He used a drainpipe to climb down to ground level and was clear of his two minders a minute and a half after they locked him in his room.

It took him another thirty to steal a locked Vespa scooter from behind a theater in the city center. As he putted off back in the direction of the pub, he wondered if he would end up stealing or commandeering every vehicle in the UK before this damn operation ended.

CHAPTER 20

   Charlie Jones left his pub at nine, walked out to his Jaguar, and folded into the backseat. His driver and his bodyguard climbed into the front, and together the three men headed west through town, towards a restaurant Jones frequented.

It was only a ten-minute drive, and the crime boss spent the time on his phone, calling people who knew people in Southampton. He was determined to find out if one of Reggie Palace’s men was missing and, if so, if the man fit the general description of the man he’d met tonight.

Jones liked the thought of having a “dead” man working for him, untied to his syndicate, unaffiliated with his town. If this stranger checked out, Jones had decided he would give him the information about the bastard who’d set this up and see what he did with it; if the man did manage to pull off some sort of retribution for Jones’s dead crew, then Jones would want to talk to this fellow again.

There was always a need for a proxy asset in organized crime.

Charlie Jones and his bodyguard climbed out of the Jaguar at the entrance to the restaurant and stepped inside. As had been the case with the pub, the people at the restaurant knew him well. They kept a table for him, and he in turn watched out for them.

He was taken to his table in the back of the room, while his bodyguard took a stool at the bar—his regular perch—and ordered a soda water. The bodyguard faced the door, monitoring anyone who came in to see if they posed a threat to his protectee.

* * *

• • •

Jones’s driver stood outside by the Jag, smoking a cigarette and thumbing through text messages on his phone.

He didn’t hear anyone walk up behind him on the darkened pavement, so he was surprised when a voice coming from not three feet away said, “Hey, mate, got a light?”

The bodyguard spun his head around to the voice and straight into a vicious right jab to his face, knocking him out cold.

* * *

• • •

Court scooped up the man and dragged him quickly up onto the stoop in front of the carpet store. Once out of view from the restaurant on his right, he knelt over the man, reached into his coat, and fished around for a weapon. As had been the case with the heavy who’d escorted him to the inn, Court saw that the driver had a .45 caliber pistol in a shoulder holster. And while the old 1911 model pistol wasn’t Court’s first choice for combat, it was certainly a supremely lethal and imposing weapon.

He pulled the pistol, jabbed it into his pants under his shirt, then headed around back to enter the restaurant from the kitchen.

* * *

• • •

Charlie Jones put down his mobile phone and fumed.

He’d spent the last ten minutes on a conference call between a friend in London and his contact in the employ of Reggie Palace, head of the Southampton criminal firm. This man claimed to have direct knowledge of the gunman Palace had sent up to Ternhill, and from what he relayed to Jones about the man, none of the details seemed to match at all.

For starters, the actual gunman sent by Southampton was forty-seven years old. He was tall, well over six feet, with black hair streaked with gray.

But the man Jones had met tonight claiming to be the lone asset from Southampton was of average height, with brown hair, and he appeared to be under forty.

Jones sipped his pinot noir. His salad was placed in front of him but he did not touch it.

“Dammit,” he said softly. It was settled now. No, the man locked in the inn back near the pub wasn’t who he said he was. He was some sort of infiltrator, here in possession of a great deal of knowledge about what had happened in Ternhill and Rauceby, but he was definitely not who he claimed to be.

Jones shook his head at the audacity of it all.

He reached for his mobile again, ready to call his employees waiting back in the inn near the pub, to instruct them to beat the man to death and then throw him in a ditch on a country road.

But as he started to lift the phone a hand appeared over his, gently holding the phone down.

The man connected to the hand sat down at the table, and when Jones looked up, he realized it was the stranger.

For a man unaccustomed to feeling fear, Jones found the tightening twinge in his chest especially unsettling.

The local crime boss turned to his man, who was positioned far across the room. But the bodyguard was facing the entrance, not his boss, and it was evident now that the stranger had slipped in from the kitchen in the back of the dining room.

Jones spoke softly, but sternly. “I call out and he pulls his gun. It’ll be over for you quick, lad.”

The stranger lifted Jones’s napkin off the table, took it back to his lap, and wrapped it around the .45 pistol he pulled from under his shirt. He put the napkin and the gun back on the table, its barrel pointing at Jones.

In his best impersonation of a Southamptoner he said, “Does his gun look anything like this? Probably so, since I nicked this one from your driver out on the street.”

Jones turned to the window, then back to the man in front of him. “Where is my driver now?”

“He’s resting.”

An eyebrow twitched as Charlie Jones realized he was beaten. He recovered and said, “I talked to some mates in Southampton about you. Men with the firm down there. They say the bloke they sent to Ternhill was forty-seven years old.”

The stranger said nothing.

“C’mon, then. Let’s have it.”

“Have what?”

“The secret to that youthful skin of yours.”

It was a joke, but the stranger made no reaction to it.

Just then, the bodyguard at the bar scanned back in the direction of his boss. His head began to turn back to the front door, but then it snapped back to the table across the room. He rose to his feet quickly, obviously astonished to see the stranger from the pub now seated with Jones.

Court grabbed the napkin-wrapped pistol and held it under the table. Calmly he said, “You’re gonna want to wave him back to his stool, Charlie.”

Jones did so. The man hesitated, then sat back down, but opened his coat and put his hand inside, his eyes locked on the stranger.

Court eyed the bodyguard back, matching the man’s malevolent stare. Without taking his eyes from this threat, he said, “I’m just here to talk.”