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“What kind of work?” the heavier one demands.
Mike says, “I’ve been installing instrumentation on some of the tankers and freight cars.”
“Instrumentation?” the fat one asks. “That’s some fancy shit you’re slinging, buddy.”
“You got a funny accent,” says the skinny one. “Where you from?”
“Manchester,” he says.
“What, the place in New Hampshire?” the fat one says. “That’s bullshit.”
“No, no,” Mike says. “Manchester, in England.”
“Give us some ID,” the other one says. Mike quickly complies, sourly thinking of how many times he had to do this back in Manchester. Sharp demands ofPaki! Papers—now.
The two guards look at his papers and the skinny one says, “Well, it looks—”
His partner is having none of it. “I don’t like it, Carl,” he says. “Let’s bring him back to the office, get him checked out.”
Mike is still smiling but this won’t work. He can’t afford to be rousted by these two, and part of him starts planning how to handle them—a blitz punch to the guy on the right, then grab his pistol and shoot the slower one in the face—when he remembers something else.
“Please,” he says. “I have paperwork. Please.”
He goes back to his jacket, hands over a folded sheet of light-blue paper. The guard on the left tries to grab it but his companion is quicker, snatching it out of Mike’s fingers. He unfolds it, starts reading—silently mouthing the words—and says, “Ralph, I don’t know. Looks legit. It’s a work order from Albany about installing some…Christ, lots of numbers and abbreviations. Even identifies this guy: ‘M. Patel.’”
Ralph’s mood seems to lighten, and Mike—remembering all the awful American political talk shows he watches at night—thinks of something more.
“It’s busywork,” Mike says. “A waste of time. It’s instruments from…the environmental agency.”
“The EPA?” Ralph asks.
Mike nods with gratitude. “That’s right. Some sort of instruments to measure the air around the trains, check out global warming. That’s what they’re doing. Me? I just do my job, get paid shit, that’s all.”
Carl hands him back the phony work order. “Nutty tree huggers,” he says. “Always trying to save the world.”
Mike puts the paper back in his work jacket, picks up his near-empty backpack. “What fools, eh?”
“You said it, pal,” Ralph says, and then Mike just walks away, smiling with relief and delight, knowing that if they are still working in this very spot in just a few more days, they will both be dead men.
Chapter61
THEIR EUROSTARtrain is pulling into StPancras Station in London when Jeremy gets out of his comfortable seat and starts to walk rapidly toward the nearest door, Amy Cornwall right on his heels, pushing through the high-priced passengers who think they’re the ones with important missions. He turns to Amy and says, “When we get to our transport, you should be able to make your call then.”
Amy looks tired and driven, but in her eyes Jeremy sees the need of a wife and mother to check in with her family. Earlier Jeremy had offered his own iPhone to make a call, but Amy had refused it. “It’s not like before back in the airfield when I made my last call,” she had explained. “Too much is now going on with my folks, your folks, and the French. I don’t want to get Tom entangled in this shit show. If you’ve got an encrypted system inside your magic bus that works better than what’s on your iPhone, I’ll wait.”
Now he has pushed his way to the closest door as the train sighs and finally slows to a stop. There’s a bell and a thump and the door opens up, and he joins the mass of passengers stepping out onto British soil.
Amy is at his side and she spares a glance at the steel arches and girders high overhead, sunlight streaming through the hundreds of windows up there, and says, “You guys sure knew how to build empires and train stations back in the day.”
“That’s what binds empires,” Jeremy says. “Trains. And we built the first ones. Come along, now.”
He strides forcefully through the crowds ebbing and flowing around him, thinking of what’s ahead, feeling like one of those fox hunters—“the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible,” Oscar Wilde called them—and he knows that in certain polite circles his work and backgrounddomake him an unspeakable. But the fox he and Amy are chasing is one part sly and two parts evil.
But has the trail gone cold?
Where is Rashad?
And will they get to him in time?
