Nobody’s Hero (Ben Koenig #2)

Chapter 26

Koenig wanted to leave immediately. Manchester was in the north and London was in the south, but England was a small-ass country. The journey would only take four hours. Bernice arranged an embassy car for them.

‘It’s a stick, if that’s OK?’ she said. ‘The Brits seem weirdly attached to the inconvenience.’

‘Jen has a ’73 Stingray,’ Koenig said.

‘Which this asshole stole last year.’

‘Which I borrowed last year. So, yes, we can both drive sticks.’

‘The north-west of England is an interesting place, don’t you think?’ Koenig said. ‘The UK’s split by a great ridge of limestone that stretches from Dorset in the south-west to Yorkshire in the north-east. It’s called the Jurassic Divide. Everywhere below has good agricultural land. Everything above is more suited to pastoral farming.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Draper said. ‘Do you ever shut up?’

The embassy car was a Jaguar XF, black as Guinness and just as smooth. When he saw it, Koenig had said, ‘Wasn’t Chitty Chitty Bang Bang available?’

‘Excuse me?’ Bernice had replied.

‘I was hoping for something less conspicuous.’

‘Face it, Koenig, you’re an American abroad. You have to own that shit.’

Koenig didn’t like that idea at all.

He’d offered to drive so Draper could grab the sleep she’d missed on the flight over. He’d expected some kickback, but she’d accepted without comment. They were moving from intelligence gathering to fieldwork, and they both knew sleep mattered. It counted . She’d closed her eyes when they were still in London and hadn’t opened them since. Koenig needed her awake now, though. There was a car in the Jag’s rearview mirror. A black BMW. One of the sedans. It was two hundred yards behind them. Didn’t matter if he dropped down to sixty or went up to ninety. The car stayed two hundred yards behind. He wanted Draper alert, not rubbing drool off her chin and asking what the time was.

‘Because of the Jurassic Divide, the north-west was an historically poor area,’ Koenig continued. ‘But that all changed with the Industrial Revolution. They had rivers to power their factories, they had soft water, and they had slave-grown cotton coming into Liverpool. They had a damp, cotton-friendly climate, and raw materials like coal and iron ore. The northwest went from being one of the poorest areas to one of the richest. It’s why it has so many big cities.’

Draper yawned. ‘How do you know all this shit?’

‘I spent time with the British SAS, and they spend longer on stakeouts than the SOG do. We had interesting conversations.’

‘You and I have very different definitions of “interesting”,’ she said. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, some of us were in cattle class last night. I’m going back to sleep.’

But Koenig was only half listening. The BMW had closed the gap to thirty yards. It had tucked in behind him, too close for another car to get between them. Now it was nearer, Koenig could see the telltale signs of an unmarked cop car. The grey panels on the grille that, at the touch of a button, would transform into police lights. It was a BMW 5 Series. A luxury car. Yet Koenig could see no optional extras. It looked like it had the basic package. Plain wheels. Non-metallic paint. No spoilers. Not even a sunroof. This was a BMW bought with public money. But the biggest giveaway was that it was spotless. Koenig wondered if cops would ever catch on that their unmarked cars were always clean and sparkly. And perps knew that. When he was with the SOG, he never cleaned the cars they used for undercover work.

As if the driver had been reading his mind, a burst of blue light flashed from the grille and from behind the headrests. No alternating with red like in the States. The colour for emergency lights in the UK was blue. There was no siren.

Draper saw him looking in the rearview mirror. She angled her neck and glanced in the passenger-door wing mirror.

‘Were you speeding?’ she asked.

‘Probably,’ Koenig replied. ‘But that’s not why we’re being stopped. They’ve been tailing us for thirty miles.’

‘You never said.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

‘Why stop us now, though?’

‘We’ve just passed a turnpike. The next one isn’t for twenty miles. Nowhere for us to run. Or maybe we’ve crossed into a more friendly jurisdiction.’

‘You’d better pull over then.’

‘Guess I’d better.’

‘But as we don’t know what this is, you’d better keep the engine running.’

Koenig hadn’t needed to be told that.