He nodded slowly. “I guess you won’t want to come in contact with customs and immigration.”

“You’re very clever, Arkady.”

“How am I supposed to—”

“I will board the flight after you go through departure immigration at the airport here. We will land in the UK at night, I’ll exit the aircraft on the taxiway, and you’ll continue on to the terminal alone.”

He groaned again, rubbed his face, then finally said, “Be back here at eight p.m.”

Zoya shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere. Except to London. Now.”

CHAPTER 19

   Court Gentry walked to the front entrance of the pub on Angels Row at seven p.m. He had a plan, but it was thin, and he was banking on his improv skills seeing him all the way through. He was unarmed now, with all his guns and his grenade launcher left in the dead Audi forty miles east, and his forged passport and wallet jammed in a new backpack he’d stuffed into a storage locker at the main train station.

He’d spent the last hour working on his accent. His strategy involved him convincing a group of Englishmen he was English, and even more specifically a resident of a particular region. He’d sat by the canal watching YouTube on his phone for examples of the accent and dialect, and he thought he was ready, but he knew well that he wouldn’t be certain he’d pulled it off till he saw the reactions from those around him.

He was determined not to get into yet another gunfight here, to use social engineering to complete his task instead of his considerable martial skill. It was going to be tough pulling this off, but impossible if his American accent gave him away.

Feigning supreme confidence, he opened the door to find a meager crowd inside, which seemed unusual to him considering this was at the end of the workday, when many Brits tend to stop off for a pint on the way home. He picked a stool at the center of the bar, waited for the bartender, and scanned the room through the mirror on the wall.

He saw no more than a dozen in total in the room; all male, all aged between their twenties and fifties. It was a decidedly blue-collar crowd and, even though he saw no overt malevolent looks from anyone, he’d been in more than enough bar fights to recognize the kind of establishment where one might touch off at any time with just a little provocation.

He ordered a pint of Carling lager, and was just a few sips through it when the bartender leaned over to him.

“Not from around here.” It sounded like a statement, not a question.

“No,” Court said; his British accent sounded fine to him, but he knew he couldn’t be sure he was pulling it off just yet.

The bartender cocked his head. Shit. Court halfway wanted to throw his beer in the man’s face and make a run for it, but he didn’t move.

“Think you got business here, do ya?”

“Yeah. I think I do.”

“What kind of business?”

Court took his elbows off the bar and sat up straighter. In a voice loud enough to be heard by other men sitting around him he said, “The kind I’ll only talk to Charlie Jones about.”

The few hushed conversations around him all stopped.

The bartender made a face, then snickered. “Not how it works, mate.”

“Maybe not for you lot, but he’ll want to talk to me.”

A voice from down the bar said, “What’s a bloke with a Hampshire accent know about Charlie?”

Nailed it, Court thought to himself. He’d once spent two weeks in Southampton with CIA watching over a ship docked there, photographing the comings and goings because it had suspected ties to an al Qaeda financier. Nothing ever came from the op, as far as Court knew, but he’d spent his time in cover listening to and attempting to replicate the local dialect. He’d forgotten more than he remembered about his time there, but by using YouTube to refresh his memory, apparently he’d done a good enough job to at least trick a couple of guys in a pub a couple hundred miles away.

Court said, “I don’t know anything about Charlie Jones. Don’t care. Kent sent me.”

He saw a flash of surprise in the bartender’s face, but before he said anything, Court heard a voice just behind his left ear.

“Kent, you say?”

He turned to find a thick man in his fifties with horrifying teeth inches from his face. He said, “Kent hasn’t turned up. You know anything about that?”

Court replied, “Take me to Jones and I’ll tell him.”

Just then a short fiftyish man in a tweed jacket and a black driving cap entered the bar bracketed by a pair of large goons. He took his hat off, nodded seriously to a pair of men sitting near the entrance, then strode up to the bar.

He’d only made it a few steps before he locked eyes with Gentry. He slowed an instant, glanced around, then continued forward.

The man behind Court said, “Charlie, this bloke says Kent sent him here to talk to you.”

The man raised a single eyebrow. “Did he now?”

Court started to stand from the stool to shake the man’s hand, but a strong arm clasped his shoulder and held him where he sat.

Court nodded. “He did.”

“When did this happen?”

“This morning.” After a pause, “Right before he was killed.”

It was clear to Court that Jones knew Kent was dead, but some of the other men in the room turned to him in surprise.

Jones sat down at the bar, facing the bartender. A steel mug with some sort of cocktail in it appeared, and the man in the tweed coat took a slow drink. Without looking he said, “Where you from, friend?”

“Southampton,” Court responded, and then he held his breath. He’d heard Kent mentioning the city as being the home of one of his team members. If the different men on the crew really did not know one another, he took it as likely that the boss of one of the men wouldn’t know the other individual players, either.

Charlie Jones sipped his drink, as if in thought.

Finally he asked, “You were there, this morning?”

“I was. At Ternhill. Kent took charge when Mickey and Martin went down, and then he brought us all the way to the old hospital.”

“Don’t know Mickey. Don’t know Martin. I know Kent.” And then, “Keep on.”

“We handed over the prisoner to the Russians, and they flew him out, but there was a bloke in the hospital watchin’ us. We chased him out to the highway, but he shot up my car and blew up the other. Kent was in the other. He didn’t make it.”

He felt certain no one had made it out of either of the two vehicles, but there would be no way Jones could know this for sure.