things look like they’re going to tumble down on you. I’ll be at the back.”
“How will I recognize you?”
“Ask your friend from Sandline,” Porter said, and hung up.
There’d been a pub of one sort or another at 22 High Holborn since 1430, though it had obviously seen several changes over the centuries. One of its later incarnations had been as a coffee shop in the late 1690s, and a partial demolition and renovation in the late 1890s had somehow managed to preserve elements of the original facade. Within, the main room was more evocative of a church than a pub, with high ceilings and an oddly shaped stove positioned in the center of the floor to provide heating, something it apparently managed to do without the aid of any obvious chimney. A long bar ran along the left-hand side upon entry, and above it, positioned on scaffolding, were several wine butts, each of them easily capable of holding up to one thousand gallons at a time.
At seven minutes to four in the afternoon, the pub was experiencing the calm before the storm. In just over an hour, solicitors and attorneys and their clients would pour from the nearby Criminal Courts, to fill the pub and wash down the remains of the day with Samuel Smith’s selection of beers. But for now, as Chace entered, it was quiet and warm, and she thought it was the kind of pub she’d probably have wanted to spend a lot of time in, once upon a time.
Chace stopped at the bar, ordered a lager, and adjusted the strap on her shoulder bag as she looked around the room, waiting for her drink to arrive. She counted a baker’s dozen of patrons, nine of them men, and seated at one of the cloisterlike tables, she saw a man who was most likely named Geoffrey Porter, nursing a pint of his own. He was slight, and shorter than she’d imagined, though it was difficult to be certain with him seated. His hair was straight, brown, receding slightly, and he sported a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. He caught her looking, met her stare for a fraction, then went back to peering into his drink. Chace didn’t mind that he’d made her, because his reaction confirmed it. She’d found her pilot.
She paid for her lager, took the pint, and settled at the table opposite him, shrugging the bag off her shoulder onto the bench beside her.
“Mr. Porter?” she asked. “Tracy Carlisle.”
“Suppose if I didn’t want you to find me, I’d have worn a suit, hmm?”
“It would have been a start, yes.”
Porter nodded slowly, looking her over. A pack of cigarettes rested on the table beside an enormous ashtray, and Porter’s fingers idly traced a line around it.
“You know me from Sandline?”
“I know you through a man who knows you through Sandline,” Chace said. “Though I understand you’re running your own service now, International Charter Express?”
“ICE, yes. Not the same work.”
“No. Fortunately, I’m not looking for a mercenary.”
Porter didn’t try to hide his scowl. “We weren’t mercs. We weren’t one of those ‘civilian contractor’ fly-by- nights, nor a bunch of washouts who got their kicks fondling SA-80s and playing at soldier, Ms. Carlisle. Sandline was a private military company. We were the real thing.”
“I meant no offense,” Chace said, as sincerely as she could manage, even though the slight had been intended, to gauge his reaction.
So far, she liked what she was seeing.
Porter ran his finger around the packet of cigarettes again, slower, looking at her, thoughtful. “So tell me about this charter.”
“It’s in Uzbekistan.”
Porter nodded, his expression remaining neutral. “How many passengers?”
“Three, exfil only.”
“Hot or cold?”
“Most likely hot.”
“How hot? MANPAD hot?”
“I shouldn’t think so, but it’s a possibility.”
“How much of a possibility?”
Chace shook her head, not so much refusing to answer as to indicate she was unwilling to hazard a guess. “You’ve flown under fire before.”
“Iraq, Bosnia, Sierra Leone.” Porter stopped playing with the pack long enough to free a cigarette and light it. “But if you know me through a man who knows me through Sandline, you know that, too.”
Chace smiled.
“Where in Uzbekistan?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going to need some details. Tashkent?”
“Unlikely.”
“Am I picking up at an airport, what?”
“No, it won’t be an airport, of that I’m certain.”
“So a helicopter.”
“At the start, though I doubt one will get us back to England.”
Porter shook his head, annoyed. “Perhaps you better just lay this out for me straight, and I’ll tell
“I’ve worked out some of them.” Chace hefted her shoulder bag onto her lap, opening it. She removed a small pager, molded black plastic, and set it on the table between the cigarettes and the oversized and much-used ashtray. “It’s a satellite pager. You flip down the faceplate, you’ll find a little keyboard, it’ll send messages as well as receive them. Today is the fifteenth. You turn it on as of the eighteenth, and it stays on until the twenty-fifth. That’s the operational window. When I’m ready, I will page you with the GPS coordinates for the pickup, somewhere in Uzbekistan. You make the RV, take on myself and two other passengers, and bring us back to England.”
“Not in a helo I won’t.”
“I’m not the pilot,” Chace said. “I’ll leave the particulars to you. Can you do it?”
Porter pulled again from his cigarette, then followed it with a pull from his pint, and Chace saw the sequence for what it was, buying time to think. He needn’t have bothered; if he was the sort to agree to the job without considering the angles, he was the wrong sort for the job to begin with.
“If I don’t hear from you by the twenty-fifth?”
“If you don’t hear from me by the twenty-fifth, the job’s off, and you can head home.” Chace leaned forward slightly. “But I reserve the right to extend the window if necessary.”
“And you’ll contact me if that’s the case.”
“Of course.”
Porter frowned, still thinking it over, looking past Chace at the rest of the pub. “What if I need to contact you?”
“You won’t be able to.”
“If it goes bad on my end?”
“I’m optimistic that it won’t,” Chace said. “You get the aircraft on station, you wait. I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve done this kind of job, Mr. Porter.”
“These passengers,” Porter said, “I mean, aside from yourself. They’re coming willingly?”
“I’m not certain how that’s relevant.”
“It’s relevant to my fee.”
“Give me a quote.”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“We’re talking pounds?”
“Do I look American to you?”
