least there were still a few good men out there.
Alex Michaels walked along the bank of the Thames near the Jubilee Gardens, watching tourist boats cruise by and wishing he could turn back time. His life had become a fucking soap opera. His investigation was stalled. His ex-wife wanted sole custody of their daughter. He was having a relationship with his second-in-command. Worse, he had damned near slept with someone else, which would have been only the third woman he had been with in a dozen years. How could he tell Toni that? What could he say?
Yeah. Now, he had a monkey riding his back, clawed fingers dug into his neck and shoulders, legs wrapped around his torso like a vise, and it was so heavy he could barely stand. He had never felt so guilty in his life. He had never done anything like this before, ever. How could he have been so stupid? How the hell was he going to make this right?
Was it even possible to make it right?
He couldn't stand the idea that he might lose Toni. But if he told her — no,
What the hell had he been thinking about?
Sure, he could try to blame it all on Angela, she had worked pretty hard to get him to her place, had set it up with the massage and all, but he wasn't fooling himself with that rationalization. She hadn't held a gun to his head. It took two to tango. He could have politely declined the offer and gone home.
You can't spike paper without a paper spike.
Okay, fine, so you didn't actually
Some Japanese tourists on a bargelike boat with a brightly colored canopy over it smiled and waved at him. Probably thought he was a local; not much difference between an Englishman and an American to look at, was there?
The tourists didn't have a clue that the idea of throwing himself into the Thames and diving to the bottom and staying there held a certain morbid appeal just at the moment.
He waved back. 'Eat shit and die,' he said, smiling falsely.
How could men do such things, cheat on their wives or significant others as he had done? Almost done. Once, he'd had drinks with a lawyer he'd met on the job, a tall, handsome, rich guy who was married to a beautiful woman. They had three children, a great home in Virginia, money, dogs, cats, every measure of happiness you could want. They started talking. The lawyer had a couple of drinks, then confided in Michaels. Once, not long ago, the lawyer said, he'd been to a fund-raising breakfast in D.C. Aside from his wife, there were four very attractive women at the table, some married, some not, ranging in age from twenty-two to forty. He had, the lawyer said, slept with all of them during the past year and looked forward to doing it again with each of them. None of them knew about the others. It was a peak moment for him, he'd said.
Michaels had nearly choked on his drink. The man must be mad. The idea of sitting at table with five women, all of whom he had been to bed with, filled him with terror. In such a situation, he would have dropped dead of fright, no doubt about it. The tension would have been unbearable. He could see his head just… exploding, like a cherry bomb on New Year's Eve.
His experience was small, but he believed that women could tell these things somehow. A wrong look or word from Angela, and Toni would
The second to last thing he wanted to happen was that she find out from him.
Oh, man! What was he going to do now? No matter how he looked at it, this was a no-win situation.
Ruzhyo followed Peel, keeping his rented car one or two vehicles back in the traffic. He did not consider himself an expert in surveillance — he had known men who could follow a damned soul through Hell's Main Gate without the Devil knowing it — but it was much easier when the subject knew you were tailing him and wanted you to be there. It was true he had shadowed people before, usually just before he killed them. And it was true he knew the basics of moving surveillance, how to use cover, how to blend into the background, when to back off and let somebody go to keep from burning them. Such skills were part of his trade, and he was adept, if not a master.
Ruzhyo glanced at a street sign as they drove past. Old Kent Road. And there, off to one side, was something called the South East Gas Works. He made a mental note of these.
One of the tricks that beginning operatives learning how to tail somebody often missed was to pay attention to where you were. There was a tendency to concentrate on your subject to the exclusion of all else. You might not see his friend, laying and watching for just such as you. Or you could stay with a subject through various twists and turns, sometimes even when he got cute and tried to see if he was being followed, but if you were not paying proper attention when the subject stopped, you looked up and did not have any idea as to where you were. In a familiar city, this was not a problem, perhaps, but in a strange town, it could cause difficulty. If you did not have a good local map or a GPS, finding your way back to your base might be a chore. And there were worse things. There were areas in every city where you simply could not park a vehicle and sit in it for several hours waiting for a subject to return to his vehicle and depart. A residential street in a well-to-do neighborhood was a bad place to stay. Rich people had things they wanted protected, and they also felt that the law and its officers should offer them priority. It might be a public street, and you might have the right to park there legally, but if the local captain of industry glanced out his mansion window and saw you sitting in your automobile in front of his property, he would call the police and they would come and check you out. If the private security patrol didn't get to you first.
Parking and sitting for long periods in front of a bank was also an unwise action.
If you drove into a strange area and found yourself near a primary school, close enough to view the children playing, you could safely bet everything you owned against a plugged ruble that police would be arriving shortly to see if you were some kind of molester waiting for a chance to expose yourself — or do worse — to the children. If you did not have an excellent reason for being there — and there
In such a situation, it would be to your advantage to have some knowledge of where else you might go to watch for your man leaving.
Peel turned into a parking lot in front of a small, gray, two-story building.
Ruzhyo drove past the lot and spotted a parking place on the street only a few meters ahead, and under the overhang of a smallish oaklike tree. He grinned. The first rule of automobile surveillance, as taught to him by Serge, the old Russian
Ruzhyo pulled the car into the slot, killed the engine, and looked to make certain nobody followed Peel into the parking lot. Nobody did.
Peel alighted from his car and headed for the building, giving no sign that he saw Ruzhyo. Peel had already told him the building to which he was going was secure, there was no need to follow him inside.
Ruzhyo shifted in the seat and looked for signs of anybody who might either be there already or arriving to position himself so as to watch Peel's departure. Should he see anything he considered threatening, he would call Peel, using his mobile telephone, and they would decide how to proceed from there.
Seated in the car with nothing to do but watch, Ruzhyo thought again about going home. The travel problems had mostly resolved, and he could easily figure out a way onto the European mainland. There had been another case in the newspaper just yesterday of some fool who had managed to bypass the fences and security cameras and guards to get into the Chunnel on foot. It had taken him all day to walk from England to France, and it was a wonder the slipstream of the trains, barreling along at 160 kilometers per hour, hadn't sucked him off the narrow ledge to his death. Several others had died thus in the last few years.
