He said, ‘Apart from a muzzle flash?’
‘Let’s hope things don’t go that far.’
‘A positive visual ID on either one of them would work.’
‘Which you haven’t gotten yet.’
‘Not yet.’
There were lights in some of the windows, both upstairs and down, behind what looked like semi-transparent roller shades. But there were no shadows cast, no figures, no movement. And no blue glow from a television set. Probably the occupied core of the house was in the back, or on the far side, neither of which we could see. A kitchen and a family room, possibly, with guest bedrooms upstairs. Or a self-contained suite of their own. Like a pied-à-terre apartment, except 50 per cent larger. Designed either for the present purpose, or for giant and incapacitated parents, twenty years in the future.
I asked, ‘You got an opinion on when exactly they’ll move into position down at Wallace Court?’
Bennett said, ‘That’s the big question, isn’t it?’
‘What’s the big answer?’
‘We’ll be closing roads a day or two before it starts. I’m sure they’re aware of that. And I’m sure they know a day or two means three or four, sometimes. So my guess is they’ll move five days ahead.’
‘That gives them a long wait.’
‘Snipers love all that lying-up bullshit. All part of the mystique.’
‘Can you catch them in transit?’
‘We could if we knew what time on which day they’re due to head out. We could engineer a traffic stop. A broken brake light, or something. But we don’t know. So we’d have to stop everything of theirs that moves, for about a week or so, to be on the safe side. After the third or the fourth time, old Charlie White would start calling in favours. He owns some local politicians, and some local police, we think. Might be worth it, just for the entertainment value alone. We’d have half a dozen solid citizens swearing up and down that yeah, OK, old Charlie might be a pimp and a thief and a gun runner, but he’s definitely not a terrorist.’
I asked, ‘Who’s the we? As in, we could, we’d have to, we think, we’d have?’
Bennett said, ‘It’s all pretty fluid at the moment.’
‘Why?’
‘We aim to wrap this up quickly.’
‘Says the politician.’
‘Who gives, as well as gets. He removes certain barriers, at the stroke of a pen. He relaxes certain regulations. In fact he begs to. He’s ready to repeal anything and everything, all the way back to the Magna Carta. An attack of this nature on British soil would be worse than catastrophic. It would be embarrassing.’
‘Why don’t they cancel it?’
‘That would be even more embarrassing.’
I said, ‘How many viable locations did you count near Wallace Court?’
‘Your thing in Paris changed our thinking a little bit. That was sixteen hundred yards, and dead-on, apart from the gust of wind. So if we look at the back patio and the back lawn and a radius of sixteen hundred yards, then we figure about six hundred places.’
Nice said, ‘Which means you’d have to search a hundred and twenty a day to be sure of finding them there. Can you do that?’
Bennett said, ‘Not a hope in hell. Plus we’re worried about the M25. That would be the ultimate just-in-time delivery, wouldn’t it? Imagine a high-sided commercial vehicle pulling over on the shoulder, with some kind of elevated shooting platform constructed in the interior, and an unobtrusive hole in the siding. And big scopes on the rifles. They could cover the whole of the patio and the whole of the lawn.’
I said, ‘Can’t you close the motorway?’
‘The M25? Unacceptable. The whole southeast of England would be jammed solid. We’re talking about closing the shoulder and the inside lane, for phoney road repairs, but even that’s a big ask. Traffic dynamics are very weird on that road. Like chaos theory. A butterfly flaps its wings in Dartford, two hundred people miss their flights at Heathrow, forty miles away.’
I sat back from the binoculars. ‘So all in all you’re saying we should nail them before they leave Joey’s house.’
‘I think that would be a very favourable outcome.’
‘And according to your various closely held beliefs, they’re going to be in there at least the next several days.’
‘That’s only a best guess. Always better to strike while the iron is hot.’
Beside me I heard Casey Nice breathe in.
‘Not tonight,’ I said.
Bennett said, ‘Too soon?’
‘Do it once, and do it right.’
‘When, then?’
‘We’ll text you. We’ve got your number.’
Bennett locked up the bowling club’s door, and put the key back under the stone, and we walked back the way we had come, out of the small grit clearing into the narrow straight path, and then onward through the silent streets, and back to the pub, and around behind it, where the Vauxhall was waiting patiently, exactly where we had left it, untouched, and not even boxed in.
‘Where to?’ Bennett asked.
I said, ‘An all-night pharmacy.’
‘Why?’
‘We want to buy toothbrushes.’
‘And then?’
‘The hotel.’
‘I thought Americans had a work ethic.’
‘First light,’ I said. ‘Be ready and waiting. You’re going to drive us.’
‘Where?’
‘Wallace Court.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to stand on the back patio.’
Bennett said, ‘Wallace Court doesn’t matter. Not if we nail them before they leave the house.’
‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Could be the endgame is all in the last five minutes, just before they pull the triggers. We need to know the lie of the land. We need to triage those six hundred places. I’d like a top ten. At least a top fifty.’
‘Those streets are full of Romford Boys.’
‘I certainly hope so. I want to be seen, still here, still poking around. I want that message to get back to John Kott, double quick.’
‘Wouldn’t the opposite be better? You could take them by surprise.’
I nodded. ‘Surprise is good. But sometimes it’s better to unsettle them.’
‘They’re not the kind of people who get unsettled.’
‘Doesn’t take much to miss at sixteen hundred yards. A couple of beats per minute, maybe. He hates me because I sent him away. He hates himself because he let me break him down. There’s a couple of beats per minute in either one of those. Both of them together, then two and two make five. I want him to know I’m coming, because that’s the only way I’ll survive long enough to get there.’
He let us out in the Hilton’s carriage circle, and we went in, and he drove away, and we arranged to meet in the famous top-floor restaurant, twenty minutes from then. A late dinner, just the two of us. I knew she wanted to shower, so I did too, and we got to the maître d’ lectern about a yard apart. She looked good, which I figured was partly being resolute, and partly being twenty-eight years old, and therefore still full of energy and resilience and even a certain amount of optimism.
We got a square table near a window, where we got a spectacular high-floor view of the twinkling city, interrupted only by the black of the park. The window glass was also reflective enough to let us see most of the room behind us. Both picturesque and safe, all at once. A two-for-one deal. We ordered drinks, bottled water for her, black coffee for me. There was candlelight, and crystal, and a piano tinkling somewhere. She said, ‘This is very glamorous. It’s just like the movies.’