I said, ‘So?’
Bennett said, ‘That’s one of the retired snipers we keep an eye on.’
‘And?’
‘He got hired all the way to Venezuela. But things went wrong over there. You know how it is. Everyone betrays everyone else. Our boy got in a gunfight with the police, and he got away, but not before getting hit in the head. Which he didn’t get treated, because now he was on the run. He holed up in a chicken house somewhere, and tried to gut it out. He ate raw eggs and drank from a hosepipe at night. But the infection was bad. A woman found him delirious, and took him to the hospital in the back of her pick-up truck. By that point his blood work looked like toxic waste. He died a day later. He had no name and no ID. But he looked foreign to them, so they put his fingerprints on the Interpol system.’
‘And?’
‘That’s William Carson.’
FORTY-NINE
BENNETT SAID, ‘KOTT is the only one not accounted for now. Which raises two possibilities. Which throws them into a panic, obviously. Because now they have to choose. Either you’re wrong, and the same guy could make both shots, or they’re wrong, and there are more snipers in the world than they know about.’
I said, ‘Which way are they leaning?’
‘I’m sure they’d like to blame you, but they’re supposed to be rational. The truth is they just don’t know.’
‘Not even the psychological subcommittee?’
‘Not even.’
‘It’s option one,’ I said. ‘Kott is on his own.’
‘What tells you that?’
‘A toothless hillbilly in Arkansas.’
‘Are you admitting you were wrong?’
‘I’m admitting I was misled.’
‘By what?’
‘Doesn’t matter yet. Doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We have to get Little Joey out of his house.’
‘How?’
‘We’re going to negotiate with him. Face to face, because of the size of the deal.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We’re going to sell Charlie to him.’
‘Like a ransom?’
I shook my head. ‘Like a purchase price. All anyone knows so far is that Charlie was snatched up by persons unknown, so now we can sell him on, under the table, and Joey can beat whatever kind of information he wants right out of him, and no one will ever be the wiser. Done deal, right there. Because now Joey’s got the account numbers and the passwords and he knows where the bodies are buried. He’s the new boss, automatically.’
‘Will he go for that?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘I mean, will he understand the logic?’
‘It’s a DNA thing. Like rats. He’ll come running. Which is what we want.’
‘Why were you not more surprised by Carson?’
‘Just a feeling.’
‘About what?’
‘Joey doubled his guard. He didn’t triple it. Yet he likes to put on a show. There were only two people in the house. Joey and Kott.’
‘Why not Joey and Carson?’
‘It was Kott’s bullet in Paris. Chemistry says so. Trust me. This is all about John Kott.’
‘No, this is all about the G8.’
‘The G8 is safe. Trust me on that, too.’
‘It can’t be safe until we get him. He’s the last one.’
‘The G8 was never the target,’ I said.
‘So what is?’
‘I need my information about the glass.’
‘You’ll get it. What’s the target?’
‘Something that doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘We’re not doing anything next. They’re still talking.’
‘Who’s talking?’
‘The committees.’
‘John Kott is in Little Joey’s house. That’s all they need to know. Tell them that from me.’
‘They’ll say your credibility is damaged.’
‘Then I’ll do what my mother told me, whenever I got mad. I’ll count to three.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Can you count to three?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Show me.’
‘One, two, three.’
I said, ‘Do it like time ticking away.’
He said, ‘One second, two second, three second.’
‘Is that how they say it in Wales?’
‘That’s how they say it everywhere.’
‘No, it isn’t. We say one thousand, two thousand.’
‘It’s supposed to sound like a ticking clock. Which it does. Second, second, second. Like something with a pendulum, in your grandma’s front parlour.’
‘That’s pretty good.’
‘What was your point?’
I said, ‘John Kott is in Little Joey’s house.’
Bennett paused a beat, and then he looked over towards the corner of the hut, and he said, ‘We should confirm these wild rumours with Mr White.’
Old Charlie backed away a little when he heard those words. No doubt the Romford Boys asked questions from time to time, of reluctant sources, and no doubt they used methods that ran the whole gamut from brutal to fatal. And apparently he didn’t expect a government agent to be lenient in comparison.
Bennett stepped over and considered the guy for a long moment. Then he took a switchblade from his pocket. A flick knife, in Britain. He thumbed the button and the blade popped out, with a solid thunk. An antique, probably. They had been illegal for so long it had gotten hard to find a good one. He balanced the handle on his thumb, with his four fingers spread along the upper edge, and he moved the blade close to Charlie’s cheek, like he was a barber about to start a shave with a straight razor.
Charlie eased backward, until his head was jammed hard against the wood of the wall.
Casey Nice said, ‘Are we on the record here?’
Bennett said, ‘Don’t worry.’
He used the blade to pick at the edge of the duct tape I had wrapped around Charlie’s mouth. He got some of it lifted and used a fingernail to pouch it out. He made a quarter-inch cut, and then started over, lifting, picking, cutting, a quarter-inch at a time, until the whole two-inch width was severed. He used the blade again, to lift a tab, which he grasped finger-andthumb with his left hand, and then he peeled the tape away from Charlie’s lips, neither fast nor slow, like a nurse changing a dressing. Charlie coughed and ducked his mouth to his shoulder, to wipe it.
Bennett asked him, ‘Who is staying with Joey?’
Charlie said, ‘I don’t know.’
Bennett still had the switchblade open. Charlie’s hands were still taped behind his back. He was wedged as tight in the corner as he could get. No further movement was feasible.
Bennett said, ‘You sell guns to hoodlums everywhere in this country. You peddle heroin and cocaine. You lend a man with mouths to feed fifty pounds, but he pays you back a hundred, or you break his legs. You bring teenage girls from Latvia and Estonia and you turn them out, and when they’re all used up, they go to Joey’s. So on a scale of one to ten, how likely is it that anyone in the whole wide world will give a shit about what I do to you next?’
Charlie didn’t speak.
Bennett said, ‘I need an answer, Mr White. Just so we understand each other. On a scale of one to ten. Where ten is very likely and one is not very likely. Pick a number.’