He came to the door of Fenton's office and heard the American's quiet voice.
"You'll have a week, and you should take this as the first day of the week. In a week either he'll have reached his target and goner or you will have him dead or in your cells. A week, not more, believe me. Your countdown, gentlemen, has started. And -can I say? you've had the luck of a break the like of which I've never had. The question is, can you use your luck?"
The police, uniformed and wearing bullet-proof vests, their handguns on their hips but their machine-guns secreted in cases, filed into the cubicle area at the far end of the ward for the hospital's emergency cases. Away from the sight of the patients, close to the bed, they unpacked the cases, produced and loaded their machine-guns. The nurses came and went, checking the purring equipment and dials on the rack beside the bed, and glanced at them with raw distaste. They found chairs, and settled in. Their role, the guns across their laps, was simple. The problem was away down the corridor where the detectives met the duty physician and the arguments began.
He turned his head and saw the cottage with the for-sale sign, and thought what it would cost to buy and repair. It was the sort of home that Lily would have loved, and the village was the sort of place where the boys would have flourished. But it was an empty thought because his job was in London, and it was beyond the bounds of possibility that he could have afforded it. It was the sort of place that some high-flying bastard out of London bought as a second home, for occasional weekends, and they were the people he detested.
They were out of the village, and soon into the narrow roads. Davies had the map on his knee. Perry drove.
If there was just the one protection officer, the principal always drove. He had jerked his coat back so that the butt of the Glock was clear for his hand to reach. He had the road-map open and on it were marked the regional hospital, fifty-two miles away, and the two local hospitals with Casualty and Emergency, twenty-four and thirty-one miles away; by now all of them would have been discreetly requested to hold plasma stocks of the principal's blood group. Also on the map were airforce bases to the north and the south-west, and a telephone exchange in the destination area; all designated as safe areas of refuge.
"It's nice countryside it's fabulous, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is."
Bill Davies knew the countryside round the Prime Minister's bolt-hole, Chequers, and round the Oxfordshire home of a onetime Northern Ireland minister, round the estate of a Saudi fat-cat, and the countryside round Windsor Great Park where the Jordanian king had a mansion. He knew about the countryside and loathed it. He called it a hostile environment.
They'd come out of the village on the one long, straight road and were now in the close, high-hedged lanes. His eyes were on the hedges, on the ditches, on the concreted culvert entries, on the trees back from the lanes. It was the nature of the job, and he regarded himself as professional and dedicated to it, that the warning time might be two seconds or three, and the principal wasn't trained to drive, wouldn't have known how to perform the bootlegger turn, wouldn't have known how to get to maximum speed. He'd half frozen just before the last junction, his hand hovering over the Glock, when they'd come to a Transit van half filling the road with the bonnet up and a man working on the engine. They'd had to slow almost to a stop before passing it. His eyes raked ahead.
"You get out into the countryside much, with your family?"
"Not often."
"You've got a family?"
"Yes."
"Boys, girls, both?"
"Boys."
"What age are they?"
"If you don't mind, Mr. Perry…"
He stared through the windscreen. He should have cleaned it. They all wanted to talk, to unburden themselves with their protection officer and it was the route to disaster. He was not tasked to offer a sympathetic ear.
Ahead, there were men and warning bollards and a heap of excavated road tarmac. The road was clear beyond, but one of the workmen held the stop sign facing them. Perry was slowing, but
Davies shouted for him to keep going and they went through to a volley of rich local obscenities. Friends fell Out, and the rule was to keep it as a job. The tools of the job were the H amp;K in its case with the magazine attached, at his feet, and the Glock on his hip. He loved the job. The pity was he might just love the job more than he loved Lily.
"How long have you been at it, doing this?"
"Quite a time."
"Good shot, are you?"
"Adequate."
"Don't you have to be better than adequate?"
"It's about planning, Mr. Perry, boring planning. Planning is the best defence against attack if there is an attack then the planning has failed."
"What do you know about the Iranians?"
"Enough to respect them."
It was final, and dismissive with it. What he knew, and wouldn't say, was that the Iranians were a different league from the Provos.
The Provos would back off from a guarded target, find something softer. He had studied the case histories of Iranian hits: not many killers made it away, for too many the reward was martyrdom. The message from the case histories would make any conscientious bodyguard nervous. He read all the detail he could find on political killing. It was his job.
They were outside a school, and in a line of cars waiting at the gate. It was a school like any other, an old brick turn-of-the-century building and a mass of raised prefabricated huts, like the school his children went to.
Parents were milling at the gate and inside the playground where kids ran and screamed, skipped and swarmed after a football. If he could, he went to Donald and Brian's school to pick them up, but it still wasn't often enough.
"Am I allowed to go and get them?"
"Don't see why not."
Sarcasm, like that was his defence.
"You don't think I'll be shot?"
"Shouldn't think so."
He could have told him, but didn't, that the Irish were gold medal standard at killing off-duty policemen, prison warders and magistrates on the church steps or in hospital wards, or at the school gate. They had no qualms about blasting a man when he wasn't taking the necessary precautions.
He said he would come with Perry, into the asphalt playground, that they must lock the car because of the H amp;K, that he must have Perry and the car in his sight at all times.
They walked through the gate. The loose change clinked in his suit-jacket pocket. Beneath it the holster was tight against his upper thigh. He hung back and watched his principal before turning twice, in complete circles, to observe the faces of the mothers and fathers, the grandparents, the kids chasing the football. He saw the way that men and women came to his principal, slapped his back, shook his hand and laughed with him. The other boy, the one they were getting home, stood by the principal. They came round Perry like they were flies to jam and he heard the roar of the laughter.
A kid, would have been the same age as his Brian, kicked the football high in the air.
The swarm followed the spiralling ball.
He'd ring that night, find out how Donald's game had gone, when he'd done the shift with Juliet Seven.
The ball landed and bounced. The bounce would take the ball over the playground fence, out into the road and the traffic.
He jumped. It was his instinct to keep a bobbing, chased ball out of the traffic. He was grinning at his own athleticism, his back arched with the leap, his fingertips pushing the ball back towards the pack of kids. There was the lightness, emptiness, at his waist.
The gun, the 9mm Glock pistol, fell from the waist holster. As he landed he snatched for it. It was beyond his grasp. It fell away from him. The gun clattered on the asphalt playground, cartwheeled, and came to rest away from the grope of his hands. The kids' shouts and yells died and the black shape of the Glock lay on the asphalt beside the white-painted lines of a net ball court.