He took one last look at her dress. ‘You sure?’
‘Of course. Safe journey. Call me when you get there.’
Chapter 20
Dominic Mooney’s Who’s Who entry hadn’t been updated since his return from Kosovo. It read:
Born: Hong Kong, 20 Sept. 1955; s of Paul and Jean Mooney; m 1990, Paulette Frampton; one s
Education: Kings, Canterbury; Edinburgh Univ, BA Hons; RMA Sandhurst
Career: Military service 1976–1988, UK, Belize and Northern Ireland (1979–80). Civil service 1986–present: 1986–99 Defence Procurement Agency; 1999–2001 Civil Secretariat, Kosovo; 2001–2004 TPIU Priština
Address: 3 Rightstock Gardens, Finchley, London N3
Zoë knew that on the first line ‘one s’ meant that Mooney had one son – who was probably a teenager and too old to go on holiday with his parents. It took her no time to find him online. She started after the morning meeting, searched Mooney/Kosovo and found him within ten minutes: Jason Mooney. He had posted just about his entire life story online, including the time his dad had spent in Kosovo. (No mention of the women and the aborted half-brothers and sisters.) He was a nice-looking boy, suntanned in the way happy students always seemed to be in their Facebook pictures. He liked swimming, and Punk, a club in Soho Street, and thought Pixie Lott was about the hottest woman on the planet. He had tattoos in Hindi on his left ankle, still wore a friendship bracelet his best mate had given him when he was twelve and was a fresher at City University, studying aeronautical engineering. His shoot-for-the-stars ambition was to work on a privately financed team sending a probe into outer space. But his number one love, his truly, truly highest devotion, the thing that would take his soul with it if he ever lost it, was his hog: a 71 FX Harley Super Glide. He was pictured with it, standing on a sunlit country lane, looking so happy his heart could burst. The photo had a soft focus to it, as if it was a picture of newly weds. The moment Zoë saw it a bright clean path opened up in front of her. So clear it almost seemed to have beacons at either side of it.
Watling had said there was no one in the wide world as cynical as she was. But she’d been wrong. Zoë beat the shit out of her for cynicism. She knew that the polite goodbye handshake of Watling and Zhang would be the last she’d ever hear from ‘the Feds’. There wasn’t going to be any bunting coming from the commanding officer’s desk on Salisbury Plain. She didn’t want to rattle the case for them, but she was still going to get what she needed from it.
Bring me the head of David Goldrab, she thought, snatching up her helmet, balaclava, credit cards and keys. She trotted down the stairs. No Zhang standing like a giant irritable spider in the car park today. She climbed on to the Shovelhead, opened up the choke and pressed the starter. She’d be in London by midday.
It was a sunny day – great riding weather. The M4 was clear, only one hold-up outside Swindon that she shimmied her way through. She got plenty of glances from men in their cars, the sun glinting off her Oakley dirt goggles like she was in some seventies road movie, the opening guitar riff from a Steppenwolf track looping through her head as she drove. The Mooneys lived in Finchley, north London, near the North Circular, where the packed terraces of the inner city began to give way to lawns and driveways and garages, lots of yew hedges and leylandii. She found the road easily – the sort of place you had to take only one step into to know you’d walked into Moneyville. High walls, electronic gates and security systems dozed in the sun. It wasn’t that far from Bishop’s Avenue, after all, where the zillionaires lived.
The numbers at this end were high, so the Mooneys’ would be at the other. She swung the Shovelhead into a U-turn and nosed it out of the street back on to the North Circular. Took a right then another right until she came to the other end of the street, found a place to pull over. She put down the kickstand, pulled out the key, and walked back a few yards, taking off her helmet. From the cover of a curved brick wall she could peer down the road to the houses. The Mooneys’ was the big fifties detached thing, with spike-topped walls and a brick driveway, the borders planted with kerria, its egg-yolk-yellow blossom balls motionless in the sun. No civil servant should live in a place like that – even the ones who made more than the Prime Minister.
She weighed up her options. There were no cars on the driveway, the doors were closed on the double garage and the gates were closed too. One of the windows on the first floor stood open. Just a crack. She inched forward a little, out of the din of the traffic on the main road, and concentrated on that open window. The Steppenwolf guitar was still grinding in her head, but there was something else. She was sure of it. Something frenetic pounding out of the house. A woman’s voice, rapping out South-London-gone-Hollywood R&B. The sort of thing those who really lived on those streets shrank from, and only rich suburban white kids thought was radical. Zoë gave the open window a small ironic smile. Jason. It had to be. Sometimes things were just too damned easy.
She sauntered back to the bike, pulling on her helmet, bounced it off its kickstand and pulled the Leatherman knife she carried everywhere out of her jacket pocket. She bent over, reached into the space above the cylinder head and gave one of the ceramic spark-plug insulators a sharp tap. It cracked instantly. She got back on the Shovelhead, started the engine and headed into the avenue, the bike’s full-throated roar bouncing off the houses beyond their big front gardens. About fifty yards up, the roar became a cough, then a stuttering choke. It died to nothing and the bike freewheeled to a stop about ten yards past the Mooneys’ driveway. She climbed off it, removed her helmet, shook out her hair, opened the saddlebag and began pulling out tools. A set of pipe grips – completely the wrong thing for the job. She got down on the pavement, lay on her side and began struggling to get the grips around the insulator.
She didn’t hear Jason approaching. The first she knew of it was when his feet appeared about a yard away: tanned, in a pair of battered Ripcurl sandals, their braiding bleached to shreds by sun and sand. She looked at them for a few seconds. Then she pushed herself away from the bike and rolled herself up to a sitting position, her feet in the gutter.
‘I’m sorry. Hope I’m not inconveniencing anyone. I should be out of your way in less than ten.’
‘It’s misfiring. I can tell just by the sound.’ Jason looked thinner than he did on his Facebook pictures. And the photos he’d chosen had made his lower jaw look squarer than it was in real life. But his face was open, his eyes wide-spaced and pale blue. No trace of malice or slyness in them. He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo ‘Oh Christ. You’re going to try and cheer me up. Aren’t you?’ ‘I heard you coming down the street. I closed my eyes and I thought, It’s an FXE Superglide Shovelhead, isn’t it? An ’80. I was wrong about the year, but I got the make and model.’ Jason shook his head. He looked awestruck. ‘And of all the houses you could have broken down in front of – I mean, I’m a total hog insect. You couldn’t have planned it any better. Have you looked at the plugs?’
‘It’s what I’m doing now. I could have had it sorted in a couple of seconds if I had a plug socket. Have to make do with these.’ She held up the grips.
‘Jesus. You’ve got to see my workshop. It’s got everything. Come on, come on.’
She hesitated. Looked around the avenue. ‘You sure?’
‘Of course. Come on. I swear this is pure karma at work.’
Together, they wheeled the Shovelhead into the driveway, the cast-iron gates sliding closed behind them. There was the sound of a water feature coming from somewhere at the side of the house. ‘Great place,’ Zoë said, as Jason opened the garage door. ‘Someone’s doing very nicely.’