Private Wars

CHAPTER 8

London—Holborn, 22 High Holborn,

the Cittie of Yorke

15 February, 1553 Hours GMT

It turned out that Crocker wasn’t a total bastard, in that, aside from the documents and the account at HSBC, he’d also been kind enough to kick-start the op by providing Chace with the name of a pilot, one Geoffrey Porter, and contact information for the same. The background on Porter that he’d included in the envelope had been terse but serviceable, and Chace supposed it was Crocker’s way of trying to prove himself to her, this token offering, as if he was saying, Yes, I screwed you once, but this time, you see, I’m giving you an escape route up front.

Getting into Uzbekistan, into Tashkent, wasn’t going to be the hard part. There were regular commercial flights, and if Tracy Carlisle couldn’t get Chace that far, then the identity was absolutely of no use whatsoever. Getting in, then, that wasn’t the problem.

Getting out again, with a grieving widower and his two-year-old son and God only knew who in hot pursuit, that was the trick. Chace had known the moment—the absolute moment—that Crocker had presented her with the op that the exfil would be the hardest part. It was some comfort that he’d anticipated it himself, and offered Geoffrey Porter as the solution.

They’d stayed in Newchurch for most of the afternoon, in the churchyard for another hour, then walking the narrow, steep streets of the little village, talking it over. Crocker had stressed—repeatedly— that Chace was to stay below the radar until she had Ruslan and son back in England. As to the method of extraction, he was leaving that to her discretion.

“Quiet?” Chace asked him. “Noisy? Do you even care?”

“If you can do it quiet, that’s always preferable. But I doubt you’ll have the luxury.”

They returned to the Volvo just after four, as it began to rain, and he dropped her back in Barlick, two blocks from the house, at ten of five, telling her that he’d expect contact at completion of the op, once she was back in- country. Otherwise, there was to be no communication between them at all.

“Good luck,” he said.

“There’s a room in hell waiting for you, you know that, don’t you?”

“It’s a flat, actually,” Crocker said. “The one below yours, I believe.”

The Volvo pulled away, leaving Chace standing in the rain and the dark and the cold at the edge of the town square. She watched his taillights disappear around the bend, then turned and walked the three minutes to Val’s house, letting herself in the back, through the kitchen, expecting to hear Tamsin screaming and Val trying to soothe the baby.

Instead, the house was quiet, Val sitting in the front room, looking out the window that overlooked her now- fallow garden. She had a cup of tea in her hand, and Chace could see the steam rising from it. She wondered how many Val had gone through already, how long she’d been waiting.

“Tam’s sleeping,” Val said without prompting.

“A minor miracle.”

“She squawked for a bit after you left, then settled.” Valerie Wallace turned her head, rather than her body. There was a single lamp burning in the corner past her shoulder, and the light gave the older woman’s skin a warm glow, turned the silver in her hair to bronze, and made the lines of worry on her face seem more like canyons than valleys.

“When do you leave?” Val asked.

Chace hesitated. “First thing in the morning.”

“Is it what you did before? What you and my Tom did, is that it?”

Chace shook her head.

“I’m not asking for particulars. I know it’s government work—I know that, I’m not daft—and I know it’s secret as well. I’m asking if it’s the same work, that’s all I’m asking.”

“I can’t say, Val.”

Val made a soft clucking noise and turned back to look out at her dead garden, raising her cup of tea.

“I shouldn’t be gone too long. One week, maybe two, at the most.”

“Was this the plan, then, Tara?” Val asked without looking at her. “You’d come to me and have the baby, and when the time was right and all of that, you’d just go back and leave me to care for my granddaughter? Was this the plan all along?”

“God, no, Val! Never, not at all.” Chace crouched, dropping onto her haunches, extending one hand, first to touch Val’s own, and then, thinking better of it, feeling guilty, settling for the chair’s armrest. “Please don’t think that. Please don’t.”

“I don’t know what to think, Tara.”

“It’s something I have to do, that’s all it is. Then I’ll return.”

“Is it the same work, Tara?”

She needed a second before answering. “Yes, it’s the same work.”

“Then you can’t really promise that you’ll be coming back, can you, dear?” Val turned then and looked down at her, and the canyons had eroded, smoothed, and her expression now was the same open, understanding look she’d worn almost two years before, when she’d found Chace tongue-tied and terrified on her front doorstep. “I mean, really, you can’t promise that at all, I know that much. Let’s be honest about that, at least.”

Chace tried to find something to say, some way to answer that wasn’t a lie, wasn’t more of a lie than the ones she’d already made, but couldn’t. In the old house, listening to the rainfall outside, the creak of the radiator in the hall, in the warmth and the darkness, there was only the truth of what Val was saying, and the guilt that came with it. That, and the emotion of the day, the impotent anger and the regret and the hurt, and again, the guilt, all of it now swelling in her chest like some cancer.

She started to cry.

After a moment, Valerie Wallace put her hand in Chace’s hair, and Chace rested her face against the older woman’s leg, and she sobbed and she sobbed, and upstairs, in her crib, Tamsin, too, began to cry.

She’d called Geoffrey Porter from the train station in Leeds the next morning, and after two rings the phone was answered by a woman with an American accent, somewhere from the South.

“I’m trying to reach Geoffrey Porter,” Chace said.

“Just a moment,” the woman said, and then Chace heard her muffled shout, and there was more rustling, and then Porter came on the line.

“Can I help you?”

“My name’s Carlisle,” Chace said. “You’ve been recommended to me for a charter.”

“Recommended? By whom?”

“Someone who knew you in Sandline.”

She heard Porter’s hesitation over the line at the mention of the company. “Sandline folded.”

“Yes, I am aware of that.”

“What kind of charter are we talking about?”

“I’d rather not give particulars over the phone. Would it be possible to meet? This afternoon, perhaps?”

“Could do, I suppose. You know the Cittie of Yorke? It’s a pub, on High Holborn.”

“I can find it.”

“I’ll be in the main room at sixteen hundred, the one with all the wine butts on the scaffolding, the bloody