So, whilst all around him guns had been blazing all day long, his beautifully engraved and checkered Purdey side-by-side had been notable only for its silence. The poor dead fellow he’d just stuffed into the game pocket of his waxed jacket was the result of a bit of bad luck on the bird’s part, brought down without benefit of dog or beater.
Ambrose had just emerged from a remote covert where he’d gone to answer nature’s call, and was quite alone. He had paused for a moment, contemplating the notion of pulling out his pipe, watching, with some degree of pleasure, the spaniels working a distant field, when a crowing pheasant suddenly rose up from a nearby bramble patch, perhaps some fifty yards to his left.
“My word,” he said aloud, and instinctively mounted the gun to his shoulder, sighting down the twin barrels. The bird’s low route of flight would bring him right past Congreve, neither too near nor too far nor too high. He swung his gun, aimed, and shot. Three pounds of flesh and feathers dropped on the spot. “My word,” he said again, walking toward the fallen prey. Despite his mixed emotions about the shoot and thoroughly dampened spirits, he’d been delighted to find that it was indeed a head shot, no damage at all to the body.
Ambrose relished the moment of handing the bird over to Alex to add to the bag at day’s end. Head shot, you see, dear boy. Wouldn’t be sporting otherwise.
There was one added bit of drama as they headed home, down the back roads of Gloucestershire leading to Hawkesmoor. In the rapidly fading sunlight, they were bouncing along the muddy, deeply rutted single country lane, Alex at the wheel, Patterson in the rear. Privet hedges lined both sides of the road, a good fifteen feet high. As they rounded a sharp hairpin bend, another vehicle, going ridiculously fast, came round from the opposite direction and both cars fishtailed, swerving to avoid a collision, skidding to a muddy stop, their front bumpers inches apart.
“Christ,” Alex said, angrily eyeing the driver of the other car. “That was bloody close!”
“Sketchy lot,” Congreve allowed, eyeing the men inside the vehicle. There were six thoroughly disreputable- looking chaps crammed into the offending car, a battered old Land Rover, all of them covered with mud and blood.
“Poachers, by God,” Alex Hawke said, glaring at the driver and his passengers. “Let’s bust ’em, Constable. Here’s my mobile. Quick call to Officer Twining at the local constabulary and the game warden wouldn’t hurt.”
When Alex started to open his own door, a gun protruded out of the other Land Rover’s driver’s side window. The face of a rough-looking chap appeared in the window above the barrel. “Move yer arse, damn yer eyes!” the ruddy-faced and red-eyed driver shouted, slurring his words. “Move yer bleedin’ arse out of me way!”
“Moving smartly, old chap!” Alex shouted, opening his door and climbing out. “Very smartly, as it were.”
“Wot’s up wit you, guv’nor?” the driver snarled as Alex approached the window, seemingly oblivious to the double-barreled twelve-bore aimed at his midsection. Congreve had seen the man load two shells into the chambers as Hawke approached him. He could hear Patterson in the back, spinning the cylinder of his old six-shooter, ready to step in.
“No need for that, Mr. Patterson,” Congreve said, flipping the mobile shut and turning to the rear. “Alex will make short work of these sods. Couple of lads from the local gendarmerie on the way, at any rate. Should arrive in about two minutes.”
“Wot’s up? I’ll tell you wot’s up,” Alex said, smiling at the inebriated poacher. “The jig is up, for one thing. Poaching is illegal, as you know.”
“Bugger off, mate, and get yer bleedin’ car out of my way then, before I—”
“Before you what?” Alex said, grabbing the shotgun’s muzzle in his right hand. He ripped the gun out of the man’s grasp and flung it backwards over his shoulder in a single motion.
“Wot the bloody—”
Alex then tore open the driver’s door, grabbed the lout by the scruff of his neck, snatched him from behind the wheel, shook him like a rag doll, and then slammed him face down across the mud-spattered bonnet. From a sheath on his belt, Alex produced a stubby hunting knife, the tip of which he now inserted into the man’s left ear. He leaned down on the bonnet to whisper directly into his right ear.
“What you’re doing is against the law,” Hawke said, quietly. “If I ever see you out here again, you’re going to meet with a very serious accident. Got that?”
“Back in the car, lads,” Alex said, as the rusted-out rear doors swung open and two of the driver’s fellow poachers started to get out, guns in hand. “I’m not a qualified surgeon, and if I have to remove your friend’s ear, I might make a bad job of it. You gentlemen are under arrest. Cops should be here in a tick. Hear that siren? That’s them now. Sit tight. Shouldn’t be long, I don’t think.”
“A good afternoon’s sport, wouldn’t you say, Tex?” Alex Hawke said, stamping the mud from his knee-high rubber boots and stroking the feathers of a dead bird he held in his hands. He’d arranged the shoot as a brief and much-needed respite in the middle of Patterson’s encampment at Hawkesmoor. Since Hawke and Patterson had arrived back in England ten days earlier, the house had become an absolute beehive of DSS intelligence operations and communications.
Senior intelligence staff from both the United States and Britain were swarming about the place, and occupied most of a warren of rooms of the east wing’s upper floor. Hawke and Patterson had a briefing at six every morning with senior staff. Impromptu meetings were held throughout the day and night as necessary. No one was getting much sleep. A forest of the very latest electronic eavesdropping devices had been mounted on the rooftops, and the normally sleepy household was now a twenty-four-hour-a-day hubbub of activity. An intense hunt for the Dog was on but, so far it least, the Hawkesmoor spooks had met with only limited success. Hawke thought a few hours out in the field might rejuvenate them all.
What outraged Hawke most was what he saw on television.
Al-Jazeera, the Arab television network, had long been broadcasting images of gleeful celebrations over the deaths of America’s soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. A terrorist fires a shoulder-mounted missile and an Apache helicopter full of young American boys explodes in a ball of fire. A truck bomb explodes outside the American command post. People in the streets below erupt into cheers. Now, in the homes and coffee shops, a new reality show: the murder of American diplomats and their families. Each assassination was professionally filmed and edited. No grainy, shaky, hand-held images here. Every gory detail was shot in close-up. And so the grisly deaths of these innocent men, women and children were now broadcast daily for the rapt enjoyment of an increasingly bloodthirsty segment of the general population.
Hawke, Patterson, and Congreve were stowing their gear and muddy boots in the gun room, having bagged sixty-some birds, not to mention six drunken poachers. The gun room was one of Alex’s favorite rooms at Hawkesmoor. In addition to the rows of mounted stags’ antlers on all four walls, a row of Georgian servants’ bells hung above a large oak armorial. The faded names beneath each bell had fascinated him since childhood. Blue Room, Water Room, Chintz Room, King’s Room, Priest’s Room, Dressing Room. Below the bells hung a warrant to execute Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.
“Drinks are waiting in the library, m’lord,” said Pelham, standing in the doorway. “Dinner will be served promptly at eight, which is in one hour. You have an intelligence briefing at nine, sharp, and a video conference with Mr. Sann at Langley at ten.”
“Thank you, Pelham,” Hawke said. “Ample warning. That gives Mr. Congreve here exactly sixty minutes to consume as much whiskey as he possibly can.”
“Really, Alex,” Congreve muttered. “You do try my patience on a regular basis.” Ever since Hawke had stopped drinking whiskey, he’d been on this bloody holier-than-thou jag.
“Just teasing you, Constable. To shore myself up.”
“I stopped drinking once,” Congreve said, “Worst twelve hours of my life.”
“If I may, Mr. Patterson,” Pelham continued. “Another courier arrived earlier, down from London by motorcycle, with a personal message for you. I’ve left the envelope by the telephone on the desk in your room, sir.”
Ten minutes later, a showered, shaved, and much-refreshed Hawke stood with his back to the fire in the
