He was a clerk, for God’s sake; he barely knew how to carry a gun. King silently damned Dulles for pushing the operation through. He knew he should have stuck to his guns, demanded proper backup, a chain of command, and an exit plan.

“Fuck.”

He locked the car up.

He took out his 9mm pistol and checked that he could see brass in the breech.

He put the pistol back into his pocket and, keeping tight hold of it, walked quickly across to the opposite corner of the street, the same side where the house that held Eric was.

The kid was a clerk, for God’s sake.

 

CHAPTER 16

ERIC COOK HAD tried to look around as they dragged him up the two low steps, off the street, and into the house. He’d wanted to see a street name, a landmark, even a smiling face, but his ears rang and his head ached, and he’d barely had time to catch his breath and see his own feet.

He had fallen across the threshold onto the floor in the narrow hallway of the house. One of the men shoved him farther into the hall with a boot against his backside. Eric heard the door behind him slam as he scrabbled his way across the floor.

He stopped maybe ten feet from where he had come in and sat with his back pushed into the corner, drawing his knees up to his chest and lowering his head, doing his best to ignore the throb of the wound in his back.

The front door opened and he risked lifting his head to see what was going on. One of the men left, and he caught sight of the street before the man closed the door behind him.

The outside seemed a long way away.

The other two men stared at Eric.

“I’m an American.” He spoke quietly, aware that the same words had resulted in a blow on the head earlier.

The men stared at him some more, neither of them spoke, and he felt suddenly indignant.

He started to get up off the floor.

“Stay there or you’ll get another crack,” one of the men said quietly.

Eric slid back down the wall and lowered his head.

He’d attended a lecture in Washington that addressed situations such as these. He remembered the speaker had given a long list of dos and don’ts if one were kidnapped or mugged. Eric could remember only two things: “Don’t resist” was one, and the blond girl sitting opposite who had smiled at him on the way into the lecture was the other.

He’d spent an hour looking at her, trying to think of a good line to use when he asked her out.

She obviously hadn’t been listening to the lecture either, because she resisted, and he never got the date he was after.

One of the men approached Eric and lightly kicked his feet.

Eric looked up.

“Here.” The man was a lot older than Eric, with a fat mustache that was turning gray at the ends. He held out an equally gray handkerchief in his dirty hand. “For your head.”

Eric took the handkerchief, unfolded it, saw it was even dirtier than it first looked, and looked at Mustache, who was still standing over him.

“You’re bleeding.” Mustache pointed to the top of his own head.

Eric folded the handkerchief slowly, trying to find the cleanest part of it.

He pressed the rag gingerly against his head, then inspected the blood on it, a black dot in the dirt. He put the rag on his head again.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, aware that he was thanking the man who had caused the injury in the first place.

Mustache nodded and returned to standing by the door.

“This is a misunderstanding. I’m an American citizen,” Eric said, still looking at the floor, trying to not to be confrontational.

Neither Mustache nor the other man replied, so Eric tried again.

“If this is a robbery or something, you can have my wallet. I don’t have anything else.”

“Shush now,” Mustache said quietly.

“I demand to be released.”

“In good time.”

“I’m an American, I’m not German . . . I demand . . .” Eric trailed off as the other man reached into his pocket and took out a Browning pistol. The man stared at Eric, who lowered his head, hating himself for doing so.

“Get up.”

Eric looked up at the man with the gun.

“Get up,” the man said again.

Eric looked at Mustache, who stared back sadly.

“Please, I’m sorry, I don’t want any trouble . . .”

The man with the pistol charged forward and grabbed Eric by the lapel of his coat. He dragged him halfway off the floor, and Eric felt the pistol being jammed into the side of his neck. The man dragged and pushed him forward, bent double, to the foot of the stairs. With a final shove he sent Eric sprawling onto the bottom steps.

He felt a boot in the backside and stumbled forward again, eventually managing to propel himself on all fours up to the next floor.

The man pushed Eric into the back room, then down onto the floor again. Eric half lay, half crouched, shielding his head with his left hand, the one closest to the Browning that menaced him, so close he could smell the oil that had been used to clean it.

“Corner, go!” The man pointed with the Browning and Eric scuttled and crawled into the corner, eventually sitting with his back against the wall.

The room was empty of furniture and almost completely dark, except for a rectangle of light tossed in by the light on the landing. One of the walls was covered by peeling striped wallpaper, which had once been colored but now looked various depressing shades of damp. The ceiling that was lit by the landing light had the pallor of a corpse and was covered in hairline cracks that looked like black veins.

Mustache entered the room with a wooden chair, which he placed near the door. He sat down and nodded to the man with the Browning, who turned back to Eric, staring at him again with the same angry eyes.

“You aren’t going to give me any problems, are you?” Mustache spoke to Eric, and Eric replied by looking confused and then burying his head in his arms.

Mustache looked at his mate and smiled. “He’s not going to give me problems.”

The second man nodded and left the room.

Eric listened as the other man jogged down the stairs, and then as the front door slammed shut behind him.

He was alone in the half-­light with Mustache.

He risked looking up.

“If you look at me again, I will shoot you in the face,” Mustache said, lifting his own Browning slowly so that it was pointing straight at Eric, who, in turn, immediately lowered his head again.

Message received and understood.

TEN MINUTES PASSED by in silence.

Eric’s back began to hurt again, a high-­pitched pain that burned every time he breathed in. He was aware his clothes were wet from blood, but he took some comfort from the fact that they didn’t seem to be getting wetter.

He looked at the floorboards and chewed at his lip.

Eric knew he wasn’t a brave man.

He knew he was in big trouble, off the grid, a long way from home with ­people who didn’t appear to care if he lived or died.

The front door of the house slammed shut, then came the thumping of several pairs of feet on the stairs. Mustache stood up. Eric glanced at him and then back to the door.

A real dread, a painful certainty came over him: he was about to die, this was it, from small-­town America to a grim room in London.

Not much of a life.

He felt like crying. Such a waste, it just wasn’t fair.

He thought about the blonde at the presentation, wished he’d thought of a better line, wished she had said yes.

The door opened and Eric looked up.

The man who had left earlier entered, followed by another, much older man. Very tall, very thin, maybe sixty or seventy, all elbows and angles. He pulled off a black homburg hat and straightened his glasses before peering at Eric with a frown.

Finally a woman entered, in her late fifties, fat.