Keep Calm (11 page)

“I do. Of course. Your communication skills are excellent.”

“Great. Have a good night.”

Adam turned and walked out to the Mercedes. Heaton nodded to Peet to take him back to the Millennium. He watched them pull off the grounds of the mansion. Harris walked out onto the motor court porch.

“How did it go?”

“Went very well, actually.”

“Did you give him the bullshit story? About the clerical error? About switching the binders?”

“I did. Figured it was best. He wasn't going to go for the truth. He's not quite ready yet for the truth.”

“So he bought it? The ‘numbers error' story?”

“Yes. He bought it. It played out perfectly.”

“Is he in?”

Heaton turned to the burly redhead and smiled as he answered. “Yes. Of course he's in. He has no choice.”

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING
Adam and Kate and the kids went over to Shoreditch to have lunch with Beauregard and Tiffany and their two children. Gordon was to put the kids in a taxi and have them meet at the McCalisters' flat so that Adam and Kate could walk for a bit, cutting through Soho before catching a separate cab over to Shoreditch. It seemed to Kate like a complete waste of time and money, but Adam needed the forty minutes of fresh air that hoofing through Soho toward Covent Garden would take; he also needed the time alone to tell Kate what had been happening and how he thought it was best for them all to leave England right away. He was actually hoping that there would be enough time. He knew it wasn't going to be an easy sell, especially when he factored in that he didn't dare tell her anything about the battered call girl, his arrest, or the sudden release from the police station.

Unfortunately for him, the discussion didn't go as smoothly as planned.

“What could you possibly be talking about? No! I don't want to go home. We've just gotten here, Adam. I thought you were doing well. You've obviously hit it off with Heaton and that lot; they wouldn't have kept you out all night if they didn't enjoy your company. He wouldn't keep calling you to these meetings. My father says he's very taken by you.”

“Yes, but why? Have you asked yourself that, Kate? Why is he so taken with me? Why am I involved in this big meeting at 10 Downing Street? Aren't you curious? I have the least experience of anyone at the company. What's going on? What's he got planned for me? I'm curious what you think the answer to that is.”

“What's going on is that my father has stuck out his neck and Heaton has agreed to bring you along on a key project, out of loyalty to my father; and you, out of some, I guess, either insecurity or resentment against Gordon, can only see it all as mysteriously contrived. It's very sad.”

Adam could understand why Kate was seeing it the way she did. He was tempted to tell her about the whorehouse and the prison cell, but was leery to do so, as any mention of him in a prison cell would only bring on bad memories and a deeper level of argument. Kate was upset already; he didn't see an upside to pushing his luck.

“You didn't want to come here in the first place, and now you want to go home because you're a victim of some odd conspiracy that Sir David Heaton, one of the most powerful men in the whole world, wants to invite upon you. It's absurd.”

They came through the top of Great Marlborough Street, cut into the small, cramped backstreets of the top of Soho, crossing down through Soho Square. There was a lot of sun and a nice breeze in the air; hordes of the locals were out sunning themselves in the park, prepping themselves for serious burns on their pale faces that had all just weathered through a long, lightless winter. They were everywhere, the sun-starved, sandwich-chewing light worshippers, wherever they tried to step, requiring them to weave in and off of the path and forcing Kate to keep her voice down as she scolded Adam.

“I don't see why you can't enjoy this? A free trip? A chance to impress your boss, a legend, mind you, a national treasure, and a chance for me to be home, to relax, to show the kids London, to see my old friends? What about that doesn't fit your plan?”

They walked on a bit in silence. He didn't plan on saying what he said next. It just came out. Maybe he wanted Kate on the defensive for a change, or maybe he really wanted an answer.

“Is part of your plan here to look up Richard Lyle?”

She stopped cold, turned, and looked at him. “Why would you ask that?”

There was no holding back now. He had successfully changed the subject and the goal was to keep it off himself, at least for a little while.

“Because I got into your Facebook account and I saw that you e-mailed him. Told him how much you would love to see him while you were here.”

She was surprised that he had that information, stunned, but only for a quick whiff. She was off her back feet almost instantly with a response she played perfectly, a volley that allowed her to hide behind the elephant that was always in the room.

“I thought you weren't allowed to be on the Internet, Adam. Wasn't that one of the key settlements to having your charges dropped? You were also not supposed to be drinking. From the way my father tells it, from the smell of our sheets this morning, there's been a lot of drinking.”

“The drinking wasn't part of the settlement. Just staying off the Internet. I haven't been drinking only because it's something that had been making you uncomfortable.”

“And now apparently you're not all that interested in my being comfortable?”

She was good. Damn good. One of the best. He always thought she should have been a lawyer. They walked on, crossing over Charing Cross. The Richard Lyle thing had been left for dead back at Greek Street, not to be brought up again for a while. His whole life had been like this since his arrest in Michigan. He never had the upper hand. Any argument, any spat, anything Kate did wrong, it always somehow came back to the fact that Adam had lost his shit with a bunch of idiotic drunken union assholes and tried to frighten the governor by breaking into the mansion and trashing his office: the single dumbest thing he or, for that matter, any husband ever did in the history of marriage.

She could theoretically go fuck this guy Lyle, he thought; he had so thoroughly lost the right to complain when he joined an asinine union plot against the hated conservative governor. Every union member in the state was in arms: the protest in Lansing against the union wages bill was the largest attended in the state capital's history. Union men from all over Michigan and the Midwest drove to Lansing to rant and rave and flash signs and yell at the top of their lungs. The difference between him and all the other husbands there that day was that they got into their cars and drove home. They didn't stay in Lansing. They didn't drink and smoke and conspire lunacy. They didn't break into the governor's mansion in a misplaced attempt to mess with his head. To trash the neophyte governor's office and leave spray-painted epitaphs that spoke to the importance of having police well paid and available to protect the citizens. They didn't buy into an ill-informed guarantee that the governor was out of state and wouldn't be around when Adam broke the back door open with a crowbar. A “weapon” that turned the politically charged crime into an “attempted murder.”

The husbands who went home that weekend still got to go toe-to-toe when their wives would e-mail and flirt with their ex-boyfriends.

The sad truth of that night in the governor's office is that the idea was never to hurt anyone. The governor wasn't even scheduled to be home. It was only meant to let him know how serious the workers were that he was messing around with, to let him know how vulnerable he was, how easily he could be gotten to. Only meant to make a point. Adam always thought that the only point that was made in that ridiculous drunken plot was how vulnerable his marriage was.

“Can I tell you what I think, Adam?” They had been walking silently together for a long block up Charing Cross.

“Yes, of course, go on.”

“I think that you should be more than happy to do whatever it is that Sir David Heaton and his group ask of you. I think you should thank your stars for my father. I think you should just relax and enjoy yourself here in London and, for God's sake, let me and the kids have a little bit of a vacation without another round of your drama scurrying us up onto a plane and straight out of England.”

She walked on ahead of him as he mumbled a pathetic version of the time-honored, “Yes, honey, whatever you say, dear.” Once they made it through Earlham Street into the center of Fielding Court, he'd had his fill of “fresh air,” so they caught a taxi over to Shoreditch.

*   *   *

THEY MET BACK
up with their kids, plus Beauregard and Tiffany McCalister and their two children, Rolf, seventeen, and Serena, eleven, at the McCalisters' flat in a newish eleven-story tower of luxury flats off Charles Square. Beau and Tiff were a strikingly good-looking couple. Adam liked to say that they were both as tall as people were legally allowed to be. They were seriously tall. Their kids had some height as well. As a group they would have been damn close to being drafted by a world-class basketball team if they weren't so damn British.

Even Tiff, who was American by birth, was awfully British. This was probably what Kate loved so much about having them live in Michigan back when they did. Kate had always adored Tiffany and Beauregard. Back then, the kids were close as well. Rolf had even been one of the first of many to comically crush the young lovelorn Trudy's heart. Billy and Serena had been playmates as well, but the four years since they'd last seen each other had played so many tricks on all of the kids' appearances and adolescent attitudes that, at first blush, none of them really knew one another anymore. It was nothing but awkward the way the parents wanted them to instantly be best friends again.

After a quick drink and a tour of the flat, they strolled the two blocks down to Great Eastern Street to grab a bite at the Hoxton Grill. The kids walked ahead, struggling for things to talk about. Tiffany and Kate coupled up, chatting away as if they'd never not been in each other's life. Adam and Beau followed up the rear with Beauregard catching Adam up on the changes that had occurred in his career.

“So, I returned here after the tax rebate for films in Michigan got tight and it turned out I couldn't get funding for movies here, either. I ran into a friend from school who sold me on a scheme to team up and buy the old Gloucester Studios, a small, run-down film complex from the forties in an industrial park just north of Kentish Town.”

“Really? You own a studio now?”

“I do. My partner and I. Gloucester UK Studios. It's been refitted and is running chock-full.”

“So, you're a big shot now?”

“I am. Massively important.”

“Does that mean I have to be nice?” Adam and Beau were enjoying teasing one another, picking right up where they had left off, just as their wives were doing.

“It does. Indeed. Very nice.”

“Yeah, that's not going to be easy.”

“You need to come round and see the studio. You'll be impressed with the sets we've been building. We've just now built an amazing submarine set for Michael Bay, the American. The fellow who did the
Transformer
movies. We've also done a complete 10 Downing Street set for a sequel to a movie that the Working Title folks did. You wouldn't know it from the real thing. You should come round and see our carpentry shop. You may end up begging me to give you a job. Bring the whole family over here to London, live a proper life.”

Adam stopped him, right as they came up to the restaurant. He lowered his voice as he spoke. “Listen Beau, speaking of Number 10. You know that's why I'm here, for a meeting there tomorrow?”

“Yes, you mentioned that. With David Heaton. You'll be in storied company there with that one and Lassiter.”

“Well, the thing is, I'm not sure, but I think I'm going to get out of it. I think it could be trouble for me.” Beauregard shrugged it off.

“I should think having anything to do with a ponce like Heaton is trouble, but that's just me.”

“Really? I thought everybody loved him. He was like, a minister or a European rep or something, right? Isn't he, like, a full-on power broker here?”

“To some, I guess. To me he's just part of the problem—his whole group. Nobody needs to get that rich, if you ask me. It can't help but go to the head. I don't blame you for not wanting to get into the thick of it with that one. But on the other hand, you're here, your wife is happy: go to the meeting at Number 10. What could it hurt?” He put his hand on his friend's shoulder and made a bad joke that he regretted as soon as he said it.

“But do me a favor, try not to go in the back door with a crowbar this time, won't you?”

“Very funny, dick!”

Adam knew making the joke was Beau's way of telling him that he loved him, that he didn't give a whiff about any stupid mistake Adam had made. In retrospect, it was way too close to the truth, but Adam didn't know that then, and didn't care. It was just good to be with a friend again. It had been way too long. They followed their families into the grill for lunch.

As they stepped inside, across Great Eastern Street, Harris and Peet, in one of the Heaton Global Mercedes, watched from afar. Their faces were stoic; even with each other they remained largely silent. They had spent the whole morning following Adam and Kate and the two kids all the way from Mayfair. To both Harris and Peet they seemed like nice people, the Tatums. Both had had thoughts to that effect. Each had separately assessed the American family positively.

That didn't mean that when the order came down, they wouldn't do their jobs, wouldn't follow through on killing the entire family. No, when the time came to act, they both planned to go through with it exactly as discussed.