“Wayne and Lockhead,” he murmured. The names meant nothing to him, and he hoped they never would. Not in the way their brother-in-fiction Robert Winters did.
“I’ve fed them into the system,” Diana said. “On a low priority.”
Whelan raised an eyebrow.
“Because the only high priority right now is Westacres,” she said. “And we can’t have anyone drawing a connection between those names and that event. Not until we’ve had a chance to . . . ensure the correct outcome.”
A safe pair of hands, he thought, nostalgically. That was supposed to be him. And almost without pause, his feet barely under First Desk, here he was: involved in what some—even Claire, he supposed—might consider a conspiracy. Almost unconsciously he reached out and adjusted his wife’s photo. Little moments of contact, that was all he asked.
“Well then,” he said. “Let’s make sure that the correct outcome is what we achieve.”
Bad Sam Chapman put no trust in itchy feelings.
Bad Sam, though, didn’t have a lot of time for nicknames either, and his own had followed him like a hopeful puppy for years, its origins obscured by the passage of time, but probably something to do with an occasional irritability. He didn’t himself think he was that bad. Everyone had their moments.
Itchy feelings, though, were superstitious nonsense, conjured into being by an overly greased diet, or too much cheese. Nothing to do with a sixth sense—geese didn’t walk on your grave. You could step on all the cracks you wanted, and your mother’s back remained her own concern.
Which was why he had an irritable moment coming on, because he had a bucketload of itchy feelings, every last one of them screaming at him to avoid the cracks, to watch his back.
This wasn’t the first time he’d had them lately. He’d spent the previous morning trawling amusement arcades in Brixton, alert for one Chelsea Barker, the latest of the hundreds of teenage runaways he’d searched for these past years, except that Chelsea, God help us all, wasn’t a teenager; Chelsea was twelve years old. It was like looking for a goldfish in a piranha tank—you had to be quick. So when the itchy feelings overtook him, he’d thought they were on her account. Twelve years old, and she could be anywhere. She could be right behind him. So more than once he’d turned to check, as if that were the way things worked, and runaway kids came looking for him instead of the other way round, but there was never anyone there, except that there always was—there was always someone there, in London. And in the course of checking, he’d seen the same face twice.
Only twice, and just for an instant. A random stranger, one of the thousands on the streets every day.
But once upon a time Bad Sam had been a spook, which meant he could never rule out the possibility that one of those random strangers might be looking to tick his name off a list. So superstitious nonsense or not, he paid attention when the itchy feelings started.
Yesterday, this had involved a complicated ride to a tube station three lines away, and a twenty-minute loiter on an unfamiliar platform, while he satisfied himself his tail was clean. The random stranger had been a young man with dark, serious eyebrows and two days’ stubble, wearing a black leather jacket over a light-blue polo neck, jeans and trainers. Something European about him. Stone cold awake at three in the morning, Sam had run the face through his mental files, and hadn’t found a match. There was a niggle, though—a loose thread at the hem of his memory. The stranger had been young, and Bad Sam had been out of the game for years. Maybe it was a family resemblance, but that made no sense. He’d been Secret Service, not mafia. Grudges weren’t handed down father to son. At four he’d fallen asleep, but had dreamed of foreign travel, and its attendant irritations: the documents that were never in the right pocket; the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.
This afternoon the itchy feelings were back, but the random stranger was nowhere to be seen.
It was another day of grey drizzle, London a cold wet misery, and Bad Sam was heading back to the office after his third morning of looking for, not finding, Chelsea Barker. His plan was to hit the phones again, and squeeze what leads he could from untapped contacts. London the cold wet misery was also a wolfpack world, and twelve-year-olds who were the hardest articles their schools had ever seen snapped like peppermint sticks on its streets. Finding the child was the most important thing in Bad Sam’s life right now, but still—those itchy feelings. Older, sterner creatures were snappable too. And who would go looking for Chelsea Barker then?
This junction here, tube station, church and building site: you had to be careful crossing. You had to look all ways. Lurking in the shelter of the station, bracing himself to face the waiting weather, Bad Sam Chapman turned his collar up against grey London’s worst.
