"Probably not," Rob said, serious again. "But I am."
"Christ, Dad, are you armed
now
?"
"Yes. Don't look at me like that."
"Sorry. But that stuff never came home before."
"It's not an artillery piece, for Chrissakes. It's just a Glock."
"
Just.
Is it gold plated? Did you give it a name?"
"Look, I'm a security contractor. It's all legal." Rob checked the GPS receiver again. "It's days like these when I really miss a fifty cal mounted on the back, Zombie."
"Sorry. The dealership said the option was that or fluffy dice."
"Okay, if she's lurking outside when we get back, I'll have a little chat with her. How does
fuck off
sound? Too formal?"
Tom laughed, then started making tapping noises in the back. He was checking something on his cell or tablet. "You're really worried about this woman, aren't you?"
"You Brits might be catching up on us with serial killers, but we're still the proud champions of the crazy stranger league." Mike needed to tell Tom as much as he could to head off questions later. "Just joking. She's not a psycho. More the private investigator variety. Anyway, we put a GPS tracker on her car, so we know where she is."
"Oh, my God, it's a
movie.
" Tom chuckled. "I didn't know you did all this underhand stuff, Dad. Now who's being sneaky?"
"It just happened." Rob hated deceiving his boy. He was obviously searching for some way to square his conscience. "I was going to give you some background, but you'll have to trust me that you're better off not knowing. Yes, we're keeping someone off Ian's back. He's done nothing wrong. Mike and I might need to step outside while you're here to give some twat a serious picturizing, though. That's about it, really. All legal."
"Understood, Dad."
"And I might ask you to wear a ballistic vest. Humour me."
Tom burst out laughing this time. Rob seemed instantly more relaxed for telling him. He'd done it in a way that hadn't involved any lies or sensitive information, but he'd also let Tom know that things weren't being kept from him for a trivial reason. Honour and loyalty seemed satisfied.
"Okay, Dad, I'll follow your dress code," Tom said. "Do you know where she lives?"
"No," Rob said. "Other than Lansing."
"Detail always comes in handy. Have you got a name?"
Mike wished he'd run searches on her from the start, but they'd never needed to find her. She'd found them fast enough.
"Dru, short for Drusilla, I think, Lloyd," Mike said. "Two Ls. Lansing, Michigan. Might also be under Wilson."
"You know plenty, then. Hang on." There was a rip of Velcro as Tom rummaged in his messenger bag and started tapping again. "Here you go. Drusilla Lloyd. Five-seven-seven Ridgeway Drive. Her home number, too. Not much data, but enough to make life less comfortable."
Rob wrote it down in his notebook. "Any family?"
"Kids put all sorts of insane stuff on social media. They post stuff about other kids, too." Tom tapped again. He took no more than a couple of minutes. "Several Lloyds in the area, so I'm guessing now, but this looks likely – Clare. Fourteen. Birthday – December twelfth. Posted about falling off her bike on Ridgeway Drive three years ago." He paused. "Looks like Dru's divorced. Clare says she's spending Thanksgiving at her dad's place because her mum's
away on business in Maine
. Aww, bless. Don't you just love kids? Her dad bought her the coolest purse, apparently. Twenty minutes ago. And people worry about government surveillance?"
"God made idiots so that people like you always have a job, kiddo," Rob said.
Mike wondered if Dru checked what her daughter was posting. "Wow, your kids really can hang you, can't they?"
Tom leaned forward to show Rob something on the tablet. From a snatched glance, it looked to Mike like a picture of Clare.
"People know it's a risk," Tom said. "But life's not worth living if you have to worry who's watching every harmless thing you do."
"Like GCHQ, you mean?" Rob asked.
"It's really not like that, Dad." Tom went back to his task, apparently unoffended. "Mike, do you know how many pictures there are of you online? National Guard news release. Some really old photos from your Oxford college. See what I mean? Even if you don't post it, other people do it for you, years later sometimes. You'd have to spend your whole life in a cave to avoid it."
Maggie Dunlop and Ian had tried to do just that. Maggie would have had her issues with Tom, Mike decided. "Where's the car now, Rob?"
"Still near the house." Rob looked back at Tom again. "Keep your head down as we drive in, kiddo."
Tom seemed to be taking it in his stride and wrapping it all in a joke. He slid down in the back seat. "Wow, tinted glass and stalkers. It's just like being a celeb. Can I punch a photographer, please?"
Mike thought he saw the Sonic as he drove past the visitor centre, but that didn't tell him where Dru was. When he parked in the garage, he made sure the automatic doors had closed fully before he let Rob and Tom get out. It was like being back on patrol again, alert to threats when dismounting. It reignited his anger from the day before.
Reduced to this. In my own goddamn home.
Livvie intercepted them in the rear hall as they brought in Tom's luggage. She did a credible job of behaving as if nothing serious had happened.
"Tom, sweetheart, you look terrific." She hugged him. "Come and meet Ian."
She whisked Tom away in a flurry of hospitality, leaving Mike and Rob to decompress. They stood in the hall with the bags and looked at each other as if a good idea would materialize any moment now if they stared long enough.
"GCHQ." Rob rubbed his hands over his face and shut his eyes. "Oh, fuck."
"I know you're not crazy about it, but it does prove that Tom's very smart."
"Okay. I'll just have to accept that we'll have blank spots we can't talk about." Rob held his arms out in submission. "All that matters is that he's happy and he's here. Let's crack on. We can still stay vigilant without fucking up the holiday."
"No,
I
stay vigilant.
You
have quality time with your son."
"Yeah. Let's go and see how Ian's getting on"
Tom and Ian were chatting as if they were old buddies. It was quite something to see Ian at ease in a social situation, but he probably felt he knew Tom by proxy, and they had something extra in common now – a lot they needed to keep to themselves. The conversation drifted to Mike and Rob's business plans, building the kill house, and why greyhounds sat on their asses all day. Tom never said a word about Dru Lloyd, though. After lunch, the jet lag took its toll and he drifted off to sleep on the sofa next to Rob, gradually sinking into the upholstery with his head resting against his father's shoulder like a small child.
Rob tidied his hair. Eventually he eased a cushion under Tom's head like a builder propping up a collapsing wall and slid out from under. Oatie crept in and curled up in the warm space Rob had vacated.
"I'll keep an eye on Tom," Livvie whispered. "Go do what you need to."
Mike gestured to Ian to stay put and went out to the hall with Rob. The GPS still showed Dru's car at the top of the scenic trail. She had to collect it sooner or later.
"Better check it out," Mike said.
Rob slid his pistol into his belt and put on his cap. "I'm never going to forgive her for dragging me out in this bloody cold. I don't look irresistible in a beanie."
They made their way through the trees and reached the western boundary of Mike's property just as the sun broke through a heavy layer of cloud. Mike held down the top wire of the half-hearted fence and climbed over.
Now they were on public land, five hundred yards from the trail. They stuck to the tree line until Mike saw the low roof of the visitor centre and a few cars parked nearby. He wouldn't have been surprised to find a discarded GPS unit and an empty space, but the Sonic was still there. Dru still hadn't found the tag.
Rob shivered. "She's persistent, I'll give her that. I'm glad I'm not married to her."
"By the way, Ian wanted to leave this morning to spare us the hassle."
"I thought he might." Rob didn't seem at all surprised. "He always blames himself."
"It'd break my heart to lose him. And Livvie's."
"Yeah, he's an easy kid to get attached to. Don't worry. He's not going anywhere."
Mike checked the camera feeds via his phone again to make sure the Chrysler van wasn't watching the house while they were distracted here. He didn't know if Dru would
recognise him from photos, especially wearing a cap, but she wouldn't have been able to run a search for Rob, and she couldn't have gotten a good look at him through the Merc's tinted glass.
They still couldn't confront her yet. If she was burned, she'd just get replaced and they'd have to start over to work out who was watching. Mike had to give her the chance to do something dumb. That wasn't going to be easy, though. She was clearly no fool.
"I'm going in," Rob said.
Mike sat on the bench near the parking area to keep an eye on the other vehicles while Rob went into the visitor centre. Next time, they'd bring Oatie. A dog was an easy way to justify being pretty well anywhere. Rob ambled back a few minutes later with a handful of leaflets.
"She's not in there," he said.
Mike was watching the entrance to the parking area. "Heads up."
The blue Chrysler van pulled in and crawled along the row of cars before parking nose in. Rob squinted as if he was taking a look at the driver.
"Same plate," he said. "Male, white, fortyish, on his own. If that's her backup, they're a getting a bit sloppy. We shouldn't even notice them."
"It's not like tailing someone in a city. There's not enough bodies to hide behind. " Mike waited for the Chrysler to get close enough to the Sonic for him to grab pictures. "I'm just collecting what I can to rule out coincidence. Is he meeting her, or looking for her?"
"We're assuming he's on her side."
"Rival company Kinnery forgot to mention?"
"Are you sure you don't want to run this past your dad? Identify the plate?"
"Deniability, Rob. If it all goes to hell, he's linked to the plate query."
Rob sat down again, head turned to Mike but looking sideways at the Chrysler. "Let's grip this. We keep talking about entrapping her, but all I'm seeing now is a two-vehicle operation. She flushes us out and the bloke or blokes in the Chrysler go after Ian."
Mike hadn't seen a second guy. Nobody on the professional food chain would send one man to do a snatch, though, so there had to be at least one other, or maybe even a third vehicle.
"We can sit tight for as long as it takes," Mike said. "They've got to get Ian outside and separate us from him. How about reversing that?"
Rob was now looking straight at the parked vehicles. "You mean invite her in for tea, whether she wants any or not?"
"If we've got her, they have to abort. KWA doesn't keep guys like us on staff. They'd hire them. What would we do if we knew we were compromised on an illegal job?"
"Thin out bloody fast," Rob said. "Or take a huge risk to pull it off and get paid. But we're good boys."
Mike realised he'd walked himself step by step across the line he didn't want to cross. This was about the way he'd chosen to live his life, his decision that he wasn't above the law or exempt from duty and morality simply because he was rich enough to do as he pleased. The guys he'd been with at prep school would have laughed in disbelief. Laws were for the poor dumb masses, not for the elite.
The law wasn't there for Ian, was it? Is it going to protect him now?
It became instantly clear. Mike could either do good, or be good, but not both.
"Let's do it," he said.
Mom's not getting any younger, Mike. You hardly visited before, but where the hell have you been all this year? What can possibly be more important than your own mother? Okay, we've all accepted how you want to live your life. Dad lets you play soldiers and he's bought you your very own little friend to play with. The least you could do is show up and be family occasionally.
Charlotte Brayne Aird, in a call to her brother about his Thanksgiving plans.
BYWAY HOTEL, NEAR WESTERHAM FALLS
THANKSGIVING.
Dru stood looking down at her laptop, fuming.
She checked her mail once a day, but she'd taken her eye off the ball when it came to monitoring what Clare was doing online. Part of the daily routine at home was checking Clare's public pages to make sure she wasn't posting too much personal information or getting into conversations that made Dru uneasy. Dru's biggest fear was that Clare would hand out her phone number to the world and all the perverts within it. She hadn't expected her to hand out information on her mother's activities instead.
Checking more frequently wouldn't have shut this stable door in the wake of the bolting horse, but Dru really wished she'd spotted it sooner.
'Mom's on a business trip to Maine.' Terrific. Thanks. Tell everybody.
It wasn't Clare's fault, though. It was wholly Larry's. He was the only one with the information, and he should have known Dru wanted to keep it quiet or else she'd have told Clare herself. Besides, he had her goddamn hotel number, so why did he need to add detail? He knew where to get hold of her if he needed to.
You still think I'm with some guy, don't you? Because that's how you live your life, and of course everyone lies like you do.
Even Clare understood that Mom couldn't discuss employee information, regardless of whether it was the dull routine stuff or building a legal case. If Dru had levelled with Larry about why this job was sensitive and exactly what she planned to do, it would only have opened the floodgates of accusations of being irresponsible and a bad mother. He didn't need to know.
As if I knew exactly what I was going to do when I got here anyway. Stop panicking. Weaver doesn't hang out on teen sites. He'll probably never see it.
In the scheme of things it was harmless, but that was the trouble with information. It was all about context and how it locked into place with other fragments in the mosaic. Dru shut the laptop. Maybe it didn't matter if Weaver found out where she'd gone. It had taken months of grinding, repetitive drudgery for her to make the Brayne connection, and Weaver definitely didn't have the time and inclination to pick the fly shit from the pepper on the granular scale that she did. That was why he'd chosen her to do this job. She was thorough and security-conscious, or, as Larry usually translated it, obsessive, sneaky, and secretive. She dug up long-dead things.
Dru took the room phone over to the window and dialled Larry's number, half-watching the parking lot below as she waited for him answer. Her credit card would place her here anyway. She wasn't adding any more to the audit trail than she had already, and if anything went badly wrong – wrong enough to pull phone records and credit card data – everything she'd done was legal, if a little seedy. She wasn't counting Kinnery's phone records.
But she was spying on a senator's family. Legality didn't matter. It was serious trouble waiting to happen.
Someone picked up. "Hey Larry," she said.
"Hi. Want to talk to Clare?"
"I want a word with you first. Did you tell her where I was? No, don't answer that. Who else could? Well, thanks a bunch. She posted it on her page. I was trying to keep that quiet. This is a goddamn staff investigation."
Larry went silent for a moment. "Jesus, Dru, you should have spelled it out."
"Well, it's done now. But I'm going to ask her to delete the entry."
"As if your staff read kids' pages. Anyway, when are you coming back?"
"Not for a few more days."
"Did your boss get hold of you?"
"What?"
"He rang me asking for your contact number. He said he'd lost it."
Dru paused to unpick the detail. Was Larry's cell number still on file as her emergency contact? Damn, it probably was. There was nobody else local to call to pick up Clare if anything happened to her.
But I didn't give Weaver a hotel number.
He wasn't the kind of man to forget whether she had or not. The bastard was checking on her. Dru felt the room shrink to suffocating tightness like one of those horror movie focus effects as the maniac's knife paused above the victim.
"Dru? You still there?"
"You gave him the number?"
"Oh, I got that wrong as well, did I? How the hell was I supposed to know you hadn't told your boss?"
"I didn't tell him for a
reason
." Larry's carelessness wasn't Dru's main problem now. Weaver didn't trust her. At least it was mutual. "Okay. I'd like to talk to Clare, please."
Dru waited, watching guests in the hotel parking lot. The guy who'd been checking her out in the restaurant registered on her in the near-subconscious way that those primal things did. He climbed into his Chrysler but didn't drive off, then got out again after a few moments. Dru looked away as Clare came on the line.
"Mom? It's me. Did I do something wrong?"
"Hi sweetheart. No, you didn't. Nothing at all." Yelling at her wasn't the answer. "Your dad shouldn't have mentioned Maine to you. If the person I'm checking up on saw that, they'd know I'd found them. Can you delete it? Then they might not see it."
"Sure. Sorry, Mom."
"It's okay."
Well, if I don't get anything else out of this, then at least I've learned not to take things out on my daughter.
"Can you do it right away?"
"I'll do it now."
"Okay, I've got to go, but when I come home, I'll make this up to you. We'll have some fun. Do something really different. I promise."
Dru gave Clare a few minutes before checking the page. The entry was gone. It might have been archived somewhere, but that was only a potential problem that might never happen, not a big here-I-am sign. Now she'd have to come up with a list of standby excuses for Weaver. She was stuck, certain that Ian Dunlop was involved with Kinnery's off-the-books activity, but unsure who he was and whether she wanted to be an accomplice to whatever Weaver was planning.
I could just walk away now and tell him it was a dead end. That's the sensible thing to do. But I still need to know.
Dru braced herself for more freezing cold tedium and went down to the front desk to see if she could borrow a Thermos. A hot drink would make all the difference.
Should have remembered that. It's not like I haven't staked out a house before, is it?
Then there were bathroom breaks. She could only keep watch for as long as her bladder let her. She couldn't recall her favourite detective show ever dealing with the thorny issue of needing to break off surveillance to pee.
While the concierge was busy finding a vacuum flask, Dru chatted to the receptionist. "Have there been any calls for me, by the way? I've been out a lot."
The receptionist disappeared into the back office and came out thumbing through a notepad. "Yes, there
was
a call, and we tried to put it through," she said. "But the caller got cut off. Number withheld. They didn't ring back. I'm sorry."
"No problem." If Weaver had genuinely needed to contact Dru, he'd have tried again or e-mailed. He must have been checking the number to see where the hotel was. Clare's gaffe hadn't made any difference, then. "Thank you."
Her plan for today was to walk around the Braynes' boundary, which would at least keep her warm. Binoculars, a couple of wildlife booklets, and a change of clothing – a gilet over her jacket, a headscarf, brown cords instead of jeans – created the right disguise for prowling around. Before she set off, she studied the pictures of Mike Brayne and the guy who might have been Ian Dunlop. The more she compared the two versions of his face, the less she trusted her own judgement.
At least it was dry and sunny today. The visitor centre at the top of the trail was busy, with a group of mountain bikers poring over the display map outside the office and ten or eleven cars in the lot. Dru took her GIS map and phone compass and headed down the trail. How hard could it be? She couldn't get lost. After a hundred yards she started looking for a point to turn east through the trees and find the fence that marked the Braynes' property. If her math was right, the boundary was more than three miles long. The estate fanned out from the road like a blunt wedge, extending at least a mile into the woods.
Rob and Ian. Rob and Ian ...
As she walked, she replayed the conversation with the Braynes' neighbour. Another element now bothered her, not a missing piece but one that didn't quite fit the hole she'd shaped for it.
He said Rob and Ian. Like they were always there.
The old man obviously knew them well enough to use first names. How did that fit with the scenario of a gene mule, a smuggler? If this was a safe house, when was Ian moved here? And if he was worth that much to biotech and the Braynes had some financial interest, why was he hanging around like a member of the household? They would just have taken what they needed, paid him, and said goodbye. And if they couldn't trust him to keep his mouth shut about it, wouldn't he be locked away or worse by now? Something still didn't fit.
Dru got to within a few yards of the fence. It was just wire, a token boundary she could have stepped over. But she stuck to public land. She tracked the binoculars along the tree trunks at eye height, occasionally tilting up so that anyone watching would think she was looking for birds. The estate had to be hundreds of acres. The most she could do was work out what was at the back of the house and perhaps find another line of sight. The buildings on the satellite map might have been barns. It was hard to tell from an aerial view.
I could just cross the boundary and see how far I can get.
But Dru lost her nerve. If it was a safe house, they wouldn't give an intruder the benefit of the doubt. Right now, she could still go home and tell Weaver something he didn't know about the existence of Ian Dunlop, if she wasn't worried about being implicated in whatever he did next. She didn't need to do any more.
Just one glimpse, though. For the record. And for my grip on reality, I'd like to see him morph as well.
Dru walked a couple of miles, intending to circle around the perimeter, but the land to the north-east of the boundary was marked as private property. She'd have to retrace her steps and skirt around the front. In a few places, it was hard to tell exactly which side of the line she was. The flimsy fence vanished into undergrowth for long stretches or wasn't there at all. There wasn't even a keep-out sign. Security here was either non-existent or it was some technology she couldn't imagine that had already recorded everything about her down to her shoe size.
Maybe I really do have the wrong guy.
When Dru got back to the visitor centre, there were different cars parked out front and people walking with their kids. She carried on and turned left down Forest Road.
Okay, five hundred yards.
She started counting her steps and eventually drew level with the approximate boundary. She couldn't even see the curve in the road yet, let alone the lodge house. That was the scale of the estate. It was a lot of land to get lost in, or hide a thief.
As she passed the house, she glanced up the drive without slowing, but she couldn't see any cars. The eastern boundary that was marked on the GIS map ran parallel with a rough path, but she couldn't see the house from that side. It was no use as an observation point. All she could do was turn around and retrace her steps.
I'm starving. Damn, it's way past lunchtime
.
Dru picked up her pace. A guy walking his dog headed down the road towards her, shoulders slightly hunched and chin buried in the upturned collar of a bright orange ski jacket. He looked as cold as she felt. As he got closer, she dithered over whether to do the usual I-can't-see-you urban stare to avoid eye contact. This was the country. It would be weird to ignore someone in the middle of nowhere, but nodding or saying hi might make her too memorable. She focused on his dog instead, a brindle greyhound. All that registered on her before she looked down at the dog was a dark
-haired guy in his late teens or early twenties, just another stranger like the cyclists outside the visitor centre.
A little way down the road, something made her glance over her shoulder. She couldn't see him. Had he turned off? He couldn't possibly have walked around the bend in that time. For a moment, she thought she was losing it. When she reached the lay-by where she kept watch on the house, she wondered if he'd turned straight onto the Braynes' land after he passed her.
No, that was crazy. He must have been walking faster than she'd thought and crossed the road to the woods on the southern side.
This was what low blood sugar did to you. It was nothing that a good lunch wouldn't cure. Then she'd come up with a better plan to grab that single glimpse of Ian Dunlop and end nearly twenty years of Kinnery's lies.