I guess I had forgotten all about her plans. Sarah wanted to go with her friend Rivka to Israel over spring break. I had told her I wasn’t too crazy about her going to such a dangerous location but I guess I wasn’t forceful enough. What can I do? Technically, she’s an adult.
Sarah’s a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. She’s a junior. I think. Sometimes I forget how long she’s been in college. Rivka is her best friend and she happens to be from Israel. They’re supposedly going to stay with Rivka’s family in Jerusalem for a little less than a week.
I glance at the photo of Sarah that’s stuck on the refrigerator with a magnet. She’s the spitting image of her mother. Beautiful and smart. A class act all the way. The only thing she inherited from me was my stubbornness.
The memory of Regan giving birth flashes through my mind. It was a difficult labor and being on a U.S. military base in Germany didn’t help. I was in the CIA at the time, working in Eastern Europe. Regan had a job as a cryptanalyst for the NSA. We met in Georgia, of all places. Not Georgia, USA, but the former Soviet state. We had a stormy affair and Regan got pregnant. The wedding was a small, quiet one on the base in Germany, and that’s where Sarah was born.
I don’t like to reflect on the three years Regan and I were together. It wasn’t a happy time. I loved Regan and she loved me, but our professions interfered. It was a distant, difficult marriage. Regan eventually went back to the States and took Sarah with her. She reclaimed her maiden name, Burns, and had Sarah’s legally changed. As for me, I dedicated myself entirely to the work, operating extensively in Germany, Afghanistan, and the Soviet satellites in the years leading up to the collapse of the USSR. Needless to say, I became estranged from Regan and Sarah.
I think Sarah was fifteen when Regan died. That was so goddamned hard. I hadn’t spoken to Regan in years, and I tried my best to have a reconciliation with her when I learned that she had less than a year to live. Fucking ovarian cancer. It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to figure out why I’m afraid of commitment now. Living with the guilt of not being there while Sarah was growing up and then facing the fact that the woman you love is dying will turn anyone off from relationships.
I became Sarah’s legal guardian, and that’s when I took the bureaucratic job with the CIA in the States, hoping I could settle into a suburban life and focus more on her upbringing. Unfortunately, I have enough trouble being comfortable around human beings in general, much less a teenage girl. It was an awkward, difficult time. I suppose, though, that it’s turned out okay. After she graduated from high school, Sarah seemed to come around and appreciate me more. I’ve read that all teenagers go through the same thing. Once they leave the nest, they become your friend. Thank goodness that’s what happened with us.
I wish I could see her more often.
I hear myself sigh as I force these thoughts out of my head. I walk downstairs to the office so I can check my other answering machine. My line to the NSA isn’t a phone at all. It’s really more of a pager embedded in a paperweight on my desk. If the pin light is on, that means I need to contact Lambert from a secure line outside the house. I don’t ever call on my home line.
The pin light is on.
4
Police Constable Robert Perkins disliked his beat with a passion. Every night it was the same thing, except on Sundays when the theater was dark. Even days were bad because of matinees.
As the officer in charge of the area surrounding the National Theatre in London, PC Perkins felt that supervising traffic was below his station. Nevertheless, he did it without complaint. He didn’t actually have to direct traffic — thank God for that — except in the case of an emergency, a royal event, or if some idiot did something to cause an accident. Perkins had walked this beat for the last twenty-two years and would probably be doing it for at least the next ten. Perkins could always put in for a transfer, but his superiors always frowned upon such requests. At age forty-three, he felt, he was becoming a bit long in the tooth for this type of work.
On weekday evenings traffic was even worse because of the business day rush hour. Waterloo Bridge loomed overhead, running from northwest to southeast across the Thames to the South Bank. The mass of vehicles traversing that particular road never let up. At rush hour, before the theater’s evening performance, it was at its worst. The “congestion charge” of £5 over and above the parking fee didn’t dissuade drivers from attempting to use the theater’s small car park. Perkins wondered why more people didn’t just take the tube and walk. Certainly it was simpler and less annoying.
Perkins usually stood at the intersection of Theatre Avenue and Upper Ground because the only place coaches could let off passengers was on Upper Ground at the back of the theater. Thus, he was practically directly beneath Waterloo Bridge and had to deal with the noise of the traffic above him. It gave him a daily headache.
It was now 6:30 and the bulk of the evening traffic was at its peak. Perkins stood at the crossroad and watched as irritable coach drivers continued to stop, then move, stop, then move. Civilian and taxi drivers moving along Theatre Avenue had even worse tempers. They expected the world to stop so that they could see the latest Shakespearean production.
Perkins had lived in London his entire life and had never been inside the National Theatre except to investigate reports of theft, sick patrons, or the occasional belligerent guest. Not once had he sat in one of the three theaters to watch something. He didn’t really care to. He wasn’t into “high brow” entertainment. When he had told his wife that, she’d replied that back in Shakespeare’s day the plays were considered entertainment for the lower and middle classes. Perkins had nothing to say to that.
A blast of car horns on Theatre Avenue pulled his attention away from a density of taxis on Upper Ground. He squinted in that direction and was aghast at what he saw moving slowly along the street and eventually stopping on double red lines, halting traffic.
It was a large lorry pulling a flatbed covered with theater scenery. Three “actors” were performing on it for the benefit of pedestrians and cars trying to go around the lorry. Perkins had never seen anything like this in all his many years on the South Bank. For one thing, lorries weren’t allowed on that particular road.
Perkins grabbed the radio from his belt and contacted his second-in-command, PC Blake, who was stationed on the other side of the theater.
“Yes, sir?”
“Blake, have you seen the lorry over here on Theatre Avenue?”
“What lorry?”
“There’s a bloody lorry with actors on the back of it. They’re doing some kind of show. It’s causing all kinds of problems over here.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about it, sir.”
“Get on to the box office and ask them if this belongs to the theater.”
“Will do.”
Blake signed off and Perkins strode toward the lorry, preparing to give someone hell. He had to stop, though, and direct a number of cars around the lorry and then run back to the intersection to unclog a maze of taxis that formed in less than ten seconds. Perkins cursed and slapped the bonnet of one of the taxis, telling the driver to hurry around and lay off the horn.
Blake came back on the radio.
“Perkins here.”
“Sir, the theater people don’t know anything about it. They didn’t provide this so-called entertainment.”
“Right. That does it. Thank you, Blake.”
Perkins replaced the radio and took a deep breath. He was angry now and he pitied the poor soul he was about to berate. He left the chaos at the intersection and walked with purpose to the lorry.