Keep Calm (40 page)

He searched for “Jack and Darleen Early.” The names came up on several property tax roll calls in someplace called Croydon. They owned a home. He looked up the address and scrolled through estate listings on the property. Jack Early and his wife, Darleen Early, were listed as owners. He read through a mortgage history of the home listed on Dulcette Way in Croydon. The owner, this “Early,” had stated he was under the employment of the national civil service. He laughed to himself that it was so easy.

A Somali woman at the next computer over smiled his way. She was happy to see any form of joy. Her big, toothy beam warmed him for a brief second.

“Got him,” he exclaimed, not even sure why he was communicating with a stranger. “I got my man.” The woman smiled brightly once again, a vacant flash of her teeth. She didn't speak a word of English.

He took a bus down to Croydon the next morning. He found the home on Dulcette Way and was there by 5:30 a.m., perched on a bus bench across and over from the suspected Early house. He had a full view of the door. He waited. No one came out for two hours. Then a young man, maybe fifteen, gangly and thin who looked like a younger version of Jack Early, left the house, unchained a bicycle from the front garden, and pedaled off. A half hour later the door opened again. A woman, a thick one with a curly shock of gray hair, shepherding two younger girls, maybe ten and twelve, walked out and away up the street.

He waited another two hours. Still no Early. The sun came out loud and proud, and then it rained. The thick woman lumbered back home and banged the front door closed. People came and went. He let each and every bus pass, seated diligently until it became obvious: Early wasn't there.

He took the bus back to London. He decided he had been too late.
Early leaves early
. He picked up a magazine left behind on the bus and read a story about himself, about his life, his bomb-making techniques. He read about a murder he committed in Kent: Richard Lyle, his wife's ex-boyfriend. Apparently Adam was a deranged bomber and also a jealous, scorned lover/murderer, on the run and extremely dangerous. It was all laughable fiction but read well. When he'd had enough, he turned to a story on some famous pop star's favorite soups. It seemed to have more truth to it, so he read it through as the bus made its way back over the Thames.

The next night he caught the final bus south. One a.m. He needed to be there well before first light, before the first bus left London. He got to Croydon at two a.m., had a coffee from a place called the Two Brothers Café, which was open late, and walked the chalky streets until four thirty a.m., taking his place on the bus bench across from Early's house to once again wait patiently.

He still hadn't told Kate and the kids his plan. They were also waiting patiently: still numb, not a lot of talking, watching old movies, playing games on an iPad, eating takeout, quietly huddled in the musty room next door, the kids' room, the one that Kate was now living in. He was alone, limping around on his side of the family hovel, quietly muttering to himself.

He would tell them soon. He would carefully tell them all that the plan was to kidnap one of Early's children, to make Early help them. He would force Early to tell the truth, tell the media. The scheme wasn't fully formed enough to inform his family yet. Kate and the kids were all he had and he would need their help, particularly Trudy's.

At 4:50 a.m., Early came out his front door and walked across the street, straight toward Adam with purpose. He had been spotted. It was over before it began. He wondered if he should run but decided not to. He decided he wouldn't get too far with his legs bandaged up the way they were. He would let Early confront him, then he'd bellow back, accuse him of attempted murder, treason. He would let him know that others knew. He sat firm and let his heart pound as the lanky little man crossed over to him in the cold, dark morning air.

Early sat down on the bench next to him. There was a pause. He looked over, half smiled, pulled out a newspaper, and began to do the crossword puzzle. Adam took his first breath since Early had come out his front door. He was just waiting for the bus and hadn't suspected Adam in the slightest.

The London-bound bus came. Early climbed on and so did Adam. He took a seat at the rear and watched the back of Early's head in the middle of the mostly empty bus as it rumbled north through Brixton. Early finally got off just below the river. Adam disembarked and followed as he went into the Underground at Vauxhall and caught the train for Westminster. On the Tube, much more occupied than the half-empty Croydon bus, Early stood holding a strap, staring out the useless windows into the fleeting black of the tunnel as the train barreled its way toward the seat of power.

Early's gaze was vacant, Adam thought. There was nothing seriously worrying him. He wasn't in any danger; his family was safe and warm. With a good job with the most powerful woman in the country, he had nothing to be troubled about. So big deal, he had helped place a bomb that almost killed the prime minister, had committed an act of sabotage that could have him imprisoned for life. His silly, smoky face revealed no burden of the weight of seditious activity. His kids were off to school and, according to the Google search, his mortgage would be fully paid in six years. Life was running along nicely for this “Jack Early.” He was most certainly not on the run; he had no reason to shave his head.

Adam let him go at Westminster. He didn't need to follow on through to the final leg of his commute. That wasn't the point. He stayed on as the Tube rocketed off. He had seen what he needed to see.

 

STEEL
■
3

Steel visited Edwina Wells's grave in Hoddesdon. There was a light rain that fit the occasion. She was buried next to her father, a former officer of Scotland Yard, and her sister who had died of leukemia at age nine in the 1960s. The family graves were on a slight hill behind a large stone church.

She missed her already. She thought about her so much more now than she did when she was alive, but that's how it was, she figured; you only realize what you have when you've lost it. Edwina had been a good friend. It had been Edwina who was on duty when sixteen-year-old Steel landed at Scotland Yard with a wild tale of taxicabs being used to disrupt the Queen's Jubilee. It was Wells who first sensed there was something to her story. Something to Steel. It was Wells who had convinced her parents to let the young Davina take the courses she took and then to serve her country.

“You've made me good and proud, Davina Steel.” She heard that, over and over. She missed her friend, and she burned bright now, smoldering with anger. She had been duped. She had been lied to. She had been treated with disdain, by a traitor. Georgia was somewhere laughing at her, she thought, laughing at her and reveling in the power she had stolen, laughing at the people that she was supposed to be looking over. Steel would bring her down, make her pay. She would make Edwina Wells proud.

*   *   *

SHE WENT TO
see Darling at SO15. She realized there was a possibility that the major general was involved with the bombing as well. There were considerable resources spent in the reframing of the Dorrington murders. It would take someone high up in that world to push those kinds of buttons. It didn't make sense to her, though—not Darling. He wasn't a clubby political type. He was a soldier, a man of virtue. He was too rigid to chase that breed of fox. She didn't see Turnbull or any of the others even having the audacity to confront someone like Darling with such a scheme.

She felt strongly that she knew people, could sense the superficially unseen. Events had proven that right. Her reputation spoke of it regularly. Yet she missed on Georgia, missed that one completely, hadn't she? Could she be this wrong about Darling? She thought not.

*   *   *

“THE PM'S INVOLVED
. From the beginning. She's aligned with Heaton. I'm sorry, sir, but it's true.” Darling sat wordless, a good three minutes—an eternity when you're sitting across from someone whom you've just dropped the world on. Darling kept staring at her, chewing his lip underneath his bushy mustache. His spartan office walls were closing in on her. She was about to beg him for an answer when he finally spoke.

“It's preposterous, but it makes some sense.” Again more silence; then, “I mean the whole thing makes no sense, yet oddly, this does make some sense. If it's true, if you're correct, then it's a horror. A tragedy for England.” He got up, paced. “If you're wrong though, Steel, if you're off on this, it's going to be the end of you, you realize that? It'll gut you. From here on in. You'll be done. Can you see that?”

“I'm not wrong. She's involved. There are others as well. I was there. I saw what happened at Dorrington. I still have the bite marks.” Darling looked back to her now. She knew what he was thinking: Dorrington. A conspiracy. It all could be true. High-level connections? It would make strong sense with Heaton involved, but this was the prime minister she was implicating.

“I could set a trap for her, sir, make her reveal herself to you. Would that help?” He went back to his desk, sat across from her, played with his facial hair for another interminable amount of time, and then finally looked over the desk intently.

“What kind of a trap do you have in mind, Steel?”

 

TATUM
■
4

Ryan Early never liked the Croydon Youth Center at the West Croydon YMCA. It had a feeling of being like a kid's version of an old folks' home. The furniture smelled like his grandmother's place in Liverpool and the chubby counselors who made the rules and kept the kids in line all had a dull, vacant drone to every proclamation they made.

He was there because his mates were there, almost every day after school—playing football, watching movies, drinking Cokes, and stealing smokes. Ryan, fifteen, was a good kid. He was thin and sort of gawky. Like his father, he had a birdlike face. He also had a serious acne problem, one that came with the package of being fifteen and a lover of fried foods, candy, and sugary soft drinks. He liked girls in a way that he was too young and too closed down to realize wasn't anywhere near as unhealthy as he thought it was.

That was the other thing about hanging around the YMCA youth center with all of his friends after school that interested him: the girls. The girls were there every day, not that they were much to look at, this pack, not that they spent any time looking back at him, but they were there, and happy, skipping, singing, and laughing, and he could look at them and dream. Girls like Chandra Johannsen, who was a neighbor and had incredibly giant breasts, or Mindy McTavis, whose dad worked for the government like Ryan's dad did. They were the two top-tiered girls at the center, and neither ever bothered to say as much as a word to Ryan. They definitely didn't seem to be inclined to do any of the “things” that he had his mind set on doing with them. He couldn't even get them to acknowledge his existence.

The new girl had been coming around for about three days. She was, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, always there. She was beautiful. She was American. She was new in the area, from what word of her leaked down to Ryan and the oily boys in the cheap seats. No one was really sure where she came from.

The girls all took to her. She seemed always to have gossip or something to dispense and was constantly the center of attention in the middle of a pack of them, making the group laugh and squeal as one. Chandra Johannsen seemed to get a big kick out of everything she said. She had dark brown, bushy short hair that Ryan was sure must have smelled like a meadow, dark brown hair that Ryan would have no way of knowing was freshly dyed. She was a little older, maybe sixteen, with blue eyes and Hollywood teeth.

Maybe she was a movie star researching a part, studying how to play a girl from Croydon. That's the notion that Ricky Finnegan was floating. They all wanted some good reason for her just being there, having landed among them. It wasn't real unless there was a reason. She was too good to be true.

On the third day she said hello to Ryan at the water fountain. She was sweet, and luckily his breath was able to keep pace with his words and he didn't embarrass himself too much. She looked into his eyes when she spoke to him. She had to have been an alien.
She's here studying life on earth. That's all there is to it
.

On the fourth day, as he was heading from the school over to the center, he saw her out and about on George Street coming out of an Orange mobile phone store. She was by herself, fiddling with a new phone. She even had the box and the bag still clumsily in hand. He watched for a bit and saw that she was frustrated. As she stopped and read the instructions, she turned and saw Ryan coming up the street. She showed a flash of embarrassment for having the problems she was having. The awkward teen wasn't sure what to say or even how to say it. He just knew his heart was racing and he needed to move his lips, so he squeaked out a quick monosyllabic burp.

“Hey.” She smiled, appearing happy to see him.

“Hi. You're from the center, right? I'm Trudy. Hello.”

“Ryan.” She reached out her hand. He shook it. Her skin was as friendly as she was—soft and warm to the touch. He was right, he thought. Her hair did smell like a meadow.

“Do you go to school here?”

“No. I'm from Illinois. My dad is here on business. I'm with him.”

“I didn't think you were from around here.”

“I wish I was. I kind of like it here.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I like the center. It's fun. Plus it's the only place my dad lets me go in the afternoons when he's off working.” He wanted to say something clever but knew it was a bad idea, so he just nodded and stared at her.

“Do you know anything about phones? I've just got this new one and I'm trying to hook it up so I can text my dad, let him know I got it, let him know I'm okay. That I haven't been taken or run away.” She made a comical face to empathize how lame she thought her father was. Ryan looked down at the phone as if he'd hit a jackpot. It was the same phone he had, the one he knew everything about. He wasn't an expert at much but, boy, did he know the ins and outs of his phone.