Few things gave an honest copper as much satisfaction as making an arrest: it was only afterwards, once you got solicitors, the CPS, the whole judicial machinery involved that things siphoned off into paperwork and loopholes. She wasn’t a copper any more, and this wasn’t precisely an arrest, but Emma Flyte wasn’t above feeling a quiet hum of pleasure as she climbed into the back seat alongside the prisoner. Devon, too, was feeling the moment: she could read this by the set of his shoulders, and the way he carelessly tossed the parking ticket they’d received into the footwell.
But this was police too: the tickle in her memory, looking at “Adam Lockhead.”
It was rush hour’s last grumble, and as Devon pulled away into the slow-moving traffic up Pentonville Road, Lockhead looked round. “This isn’t the way to the Park.”
This was true. They were heading for another safe house—if the Service ever diversified into private rentals, they wouldn’t have to worry about the cuts. On the other hand, they’d have nowhere to stow problems like Adam Lockhead while they worked out what to do with him.
“Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.” Diana Taverner’s instructions: Emma was starting to feel like Lady Di’s personal gopher rather than head of internal security.
“Who is he?” she’d asked; a not unreasonable question, she felt. But Taverner’s response had nearly melted her mobile: a twenty-second blast of controlled fury, following which she’d repeated her instructions. Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.
If not for that, Emma certainly wouldn’t have said what she said to Lockhead now, which was: “Have we met?”
He stared, his expression utterly serious. “I think I’d remember.”
It was the mole on his upper lip. Not that she recognised it, precisely, but it nudged something, a tantalising knowledge on the edge of recollection. She opened his passport again, glanced at the photograph. Not the same man. Similar, but there was no mole, and the words
He hadn’t been able to achieve the speed he’d have liked—it was central London: walking pace the usual ceiling—but he hit the target hard in the circumstances: swerving out into the opposite lane when the oncoming traffic hit a lull, then a violent full-on smash to the driver’s side. He was out of his own recently-stolen vehicle inside seconds, limping slightly from the morning’s events, but otherwise unscathed. The target car’s driver was a hefty-looking black man whose reactions had been distinctly below par, and had mostly consisted of being swallowed by his airbag.
All around them, cars were screeching to a halt, and pedestrians pointing. It was still raining, of course; the ideal setting for an accident.
His second of the day.
After being sideswiped by the taxi in the garage forecourt, an impact he’d barely had time to brace for—instinct had taken over; his body ignoring his mind, leaping for the roof, pulling himself over the cab even before it had screamed to a standstill—Patrice had lost himself in the same sidestreets Sam Chapman had tried to vanish into, with more success, because nobody came looking. They were all too busy picking themselves up off the ground. The rain had continued to hammer down, and the skies growled occasionally, as if hating to give the impression they were already doing their worst. By the time he’d re-emerged onto a main road the pavements were largely empty, and the gutters were swirling with oil-flecked water, puddles swamping the intersections.
Nothing like the rain for clearing the streets.
He’d rung home, the part of him that hated to do this standing no chance against the part that insisted he follow protocol.
“Package still undelivered.”
This was greeted with a silence that whistled down the line all the way from Europe, he wasn’t sure exactly where. That, too, was protocol.
Eventually, Frank had spoken. “Are you compromised?”
Meaning injured or taken.
Patrice said, “I’m gold,” because any other metal would have meant the opposite. The injuries he’d collected rolling over the taxi weren’t worth enumerating. Injuries only mattered if they slowed you down: if they didn’t, you were gold. “I’m gold.”
“Bertrand lit up.”
