Jules followed him inside, where he was immediately besieged by members of his staff, all with urgent demands on his time. At least in here the air was noticeably cooler and drier.
‘Okay. I could murder a cup of tea,’ she said, more to herself than anyone else.
But beyond that, she had no idea of how to proceed. Henry Cesky might be a crazed revenger, but he was smart, rich and increasingly powerful. He was also a major and very public supporter of the President of the United States.
24
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Jed Culver was surprised to find himself nervous. Not wetting-his-pants nervous, but more anxious about attending a meeting than he had been in a long while. He was not the sort of man who was prone to unproductive worry and doubt. When he found himself without information, he sought it out. In a situation where he lacked control, he would fight and scheme and work away until he had it. That was why James Kipper valued him as a sword and shield. He did not blanch from the hard necessities, yet as he hurried down the hallway, flanked by his aides, a feeling not unlike indigestion gnawed at him. He recognised it for what it was. Anxiety.
He told no one, of course. Allowed no sign to show on his face or interrupt his stride along the corridors of Echelon’s headquarters in Vancouver. The office was unremarkable, resembling any other civil-service facility. The accents were mainly Canadian and American, although leavened by occasional British and Australian voices and once the unmistakable strangled vowels of a New Zealander.
He was satisfied to see that some standards were maintained here, at least. Like him, everyone was dressed in proper business attire, the men in suits and ties, the women in a wider selection of smart office wear. Kip’s well-known preference for casual clothing hadn’t made much of an impact here, apparently, even though Vancouver and Seattle had grown so close as to become one, in many other ways.
‘Mr Culver.’
Jed looked up from the briefing paper he’d been skimming. One of the reasons Echelon ran such a tight ship was standing in front of him, waiting outside a conference room. Wales Larrison, Deputy Director, Special Clearances and Research.
‘Ah, Director Larrison.’
‘Glad you could make it, sir,’ said Larrison. ‘We don’t get many visitors from so far up the food chain dropping in on us.’
‘I hardly need to,’ Culver replied. ‘Unlike so many of my other charges, you don’t cause me problems. You solve them.’
‘We try.’ The director shrugged. ‘If you’ll follow me, we’re in here today. No staffers, of course.’
Jed felt, rather than saw, the way his two aides bristled at the dismissal. Even hailing from a much-reduced White House, the young men and women who fetched and carried for him were little different from their forebears. Their own importance loomed very large in their consideration.
‘Of course,’ said Culver, defusing any issue with a wave of his hand. ‘Mike, I’ll need the President’s revised schedule for his APEC trip by this afternoon, if you think you can shake that out of the trees over at State. Sally, you go too. It might need both of you yelling at them to wake someone up over there.’
The aides nodded and hurried away to tend to the very important business of making phone calls and establishing just how much more important they were than the people they were talking to.
‘That’ll keep ‘em happy for hours,’ he said.
Larrison murmured something to his own aide, a young Welsh woman, to judge by her lilting tone. She made a few notes in a folder before gliding away to attend to whatever villainy her boss had just set in train. When the two men were alone, the Echelon spy chief used a magnetic key to open the solid-looking double doors to the conference room.
Jed set his features to disguise the acid burn in his stomach and stepped through to take his meeting with a killer. That wasn’t the reason for his anxiety. Rather, he knew that by being here he was disobeying a direct order from the President of the United States. He’d done as Kip had asked, by bringing the FBI in on the link between Ozal’s shipping company and Blackstone, but he hadn’t pressed the issue with them, hadn’t made it a priority. The Bureau didn’t have the resources to assign strike teams of special agents on the whims of a political operator like himself, and he trusted them to take their time, working slowly and methodically away at the documents he had provided.
In the meantime, the Chief of Staff would do what he’d always done. He would take control of events, even at risk to himself. He knew there was only one person he trusted to strike hard and fast at Blackstone’s newly exposed weak point. And she was the only person in the room when he and Director Larrison entered.
A young woman, maybe thirty - Jed was increasingly thinking of people in their thirties as young. Her features struck him as handsome rather than pretty. She wasn’t masculine but all the lines and planes of her face seemed very cut and angular, like an athlete who had stripped their body fat back to a single-figure percentage. He was aware of his own very generous belly pulling at the buttons of his waistcoat. He hated himself for doing it, but before he could stop himself, he’d tried to suck in his stomach.
‘Ms Monroe,’ he said, nodding as she looked up from the table, where she’d been reading through a sheaf of papers. Most normal people, he imagined, would’ve been drawn to the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Downtown Vancouver stretched away to the river and the North Shore Mountains in the distance and sparkled under a fierce winter sun. Monroe appeared to have drawn a curtain specifically to block the vista, or more likely to block any view from the outside, even though he knew the glass had been treated with a film that turned it into a mirror when viewed from the street.
Special Agent Monroe stood up, but waited for Culver to move towards her and extend his hand. Her grip was strong, but it was the rough, calloused texture of her palm that he noticed. It felt like he was shaking hands with a violinist whose second job was bricklaying.
‘Mr Culver,’ she said. Her voice put him right back inside the conversation she’d had with Kip as she flew into the Battle of New York, looking for Baumer. She’d been dressed in black combat coveralls and shouting over the roar of a C-130. She had been angry too, he recalled. Dangerously angry. In person, her voice was quite soft and she spoke with a distant, ironic tone that made him feel as though he’d already been judged.
‘How’s your family, Ms Monroe? Bret and … Monique, isn’t it?’
‘Do you care?’ she asked flatly.
‘Caitlin …’ growled Wales Larrison.
The assassin sketched a lopsided grin that went nowhere near softening her features.
‘I was just wondering.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Culver,’ said Larrison, frowning at his senior student. ‘Agent Monroe can be unusually and unjustifiably difficult at times.’
Jed blew them both off. His smile was genuine. The ‘you got me’ grin of an old-time grifter caught out by his mark.
‘No. It’s fair enough, Larrison. Like I give a fuck about her family. We all know I read the briefing sheet before coming over here, to give me some personal stake to play when we met. I care about Ms Monroe’s personal affairs as much as she cares about mine, no doubt - minimally, and only so much as it impacts on our business. So, Ms Monroe, how
She unpacked a smile and handed it back to him, but with a touch less frost than before. ‘They are safe, as you’d know, sir. The Brits have them tucked away on a farm up in Scotland. They have good people looking after them, and more taking care of our farm while we’re away. They’re not a distraction. They’re a motivation. Is that what you wanted to hear, Mr Culver?’
Jed nodded, just a slight bobbing of the head. ‘It’s good that you’re motivated,’ he told her, ‘because I have something to ask of you.’
‘You do?’ she shot back. ‘Or the President does?’
Larrison looked like he was preparing to get all stern and old school again, but Culver shook his head as if to say
‘I’ll tell you straight, Ms Monroe. Caitlin. You mind if I call you Caitlin?’
‘The list of things I care about is very short.’
He took a seat in the nearest swivel chair and motioned for the others to do the same as he gazed out over
