Zack nodded. “I’ll get on a flight this afternoon.”
“That works,” Hanley said, and then he hung up.
Hightower put the phone down, then looked across the street into the café and watched Andie ringing up a customer.
His daughter.
He shook his head a little, admonishing himself.
Nothisdaughter. Pete Delaney’s daughter.
Zack didn’t have family.
He had his work.
He forced himself to take his eyes away from Cara’s Bakehouse, then fired up the engine of the truck and headed off to his hotel to pack.
He’d be back in a few days, he told himself, and when he got back, he would try his damnedest to just leave Stacy…Andie…alone.
As before, as was often the case these days, a jolt of nerve pain in his leg gave him something else to focus on as he rolled on through the snow.
Seventeen
The home of Sir Allen Glazebrook was called Greenend Grange; it sat four hundred meters off a quiet country road in the civil parish of Charlbury, just northwest of Oxford and two hours from central London. Positioned on the edge of the Cotswolds, the twenty-room Tudor manor house was first constructed in the 1580s on two hundred acres of gently rolling hills; the stone structure was large and stately by any normal standard, but the property was only twenty acres now. The entrance to Greenend Grange was foliage covered and relatively simple compared to other properties in this area of rural England, and the Cotswolds were dotted with even larger Elizabethan and medieval homes and castles.
Greenend Grange could be passed by on the road without a second glance, though it was an undeniably magnificent place.
The property had been in the Glazebrook family since the turn of the last century, though in both Great Wars it had been handed over to the Crown as a hospital and rehabilitation facility.
Today Sir Allen was the only Glazebrook living on the sprawling property, though ten full-time security staff inhabited outbuildings on the grounds, along with three full-time attendants: a cook, a housekeeper, and a butler.
In his seventy-first year, Sir Allen had served as an officer in MI5, British internal intelligence, for three decades, rising to the post of deputydirector general before leaving government to go into the private sector. These days he ran his own international security consulting shop, but not out of the United Kingdom because of his nation’s laws about such things. With offices in Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Mexico City, and Jakarta, Glazebrook’s company, Advanced Dynamics Staffing Solutions, specialized in assisting foreign nations with staffing their militaries with highly trained advisors.
He offered other services, as well, but the other services he offered weren’t advertised.
Glazebrook’s wife had died of cancer three years earlier; his daughter was in her thirties, a high-profile solicitor in London, and both his sons were in their twenties, one a major in the Royal Air Force and the other a captain in the Royal Marines.
For this reason, he spent many of his evenings at home, this time of year in front of a roaring fireplace in his second-floor library, reading and enjoying a port or a whiskey.
At eight p.m., he was going through some paperwork at his desk as his butler was setting the logs in the fireplace when a surprise call came for him. An old friend, a colleague from his past, claimed to be in the area and asked if he could drop by for a quick conversation; the tone of the ask was friendly, but Glazebrook detected a distinct sense of purpose to it that the caller did not try very hard to hide.
He also knew this man well enough to know that he didn’t just happen to be in Charlbury. He’d come from abroad for the meet, and he’d not set it up in advance.
Despite the obvious deceit in the pretense of the meeting, Sir Allen asked the man to drop by as soon as was convenient. He was bored, to tell the truth; he had a guess or two about what the man might want from him; and most of all, Sir Allen had fought a war with this fellow, and he enjoyed a good war story or two with an old colleague.
—
The December night was particularly cold and blustery; the guard in the stone shack at the end of the drive checked the arriving car quickly with a flashlight, then let the lone man through. He traveled up the drive andparked as instructed in the forecourt of the manor house, his headlights illuminating two heavily bundled security officers, their black rifles across their chests contrasting with the bright orange of their ski jackets.
Sixty-three-year-old William Tully turned off the engine of his rental and stepped out, took off his raincoat even though there was a smattering of precipitation blowing in the cold wind, and extended his arms.
Tully was Northern Irish, short, with dark hair and bushy eyebrows and a small face that smiled apologetically as the men wanded him and frisked him.
“Cold night, aye?” he said, just making conversation.
“Proper winter, finally, sir,” the guard on the right replied as he ran his hands through the raincoat.
His cell phone was taken from him by the other officer, placed in a Faraday cage, a lead-lined bag, and then the officer slipped it into his pocket.
