“I was bleedin’ right not to trust you.”

“No, sir. You were wrong. I’m exactly who I said I was. I’m the bloke who’s gonna exact some payback from the people who got all your boys killed.”

“But you ain’t from Southampton, are ya?”

“I’m from one of the other firms. I won’t be sayin’ which.”

Jones closed his eyes a moment, a look of frustration on his face. “I knew something was off about that accent of yours.”

Court found himself momentarily crestfallen; he thought he should have been awarded an Oscar for his performance. But he made no outward reaction.

Jones sipped his wine, but Court could see the man’s nerves. Court had been unnerving people for decades, after all, so he knew the cues.

The Brit said, “Why should I help you now?”

“Because I’m the guy you want fighting for you, and I’m also the guy you don’t want fighting against you. You give me the name of this man in London, then I get up and walk out the door. You don’t see me again. You don’t ever learn my name. You just sit right here, live your life, and know that sooner or later, the people involved with all this will pay for what happened to your men. Hell, if you want you can take credit for it, tell all your mates you were the one who exacted retribution for your seven employees.”

Court shrugged. “Or don’t . . . I don’t give a toss either way.”

Charlie Jones finished his glass, then poured more wine from the bottle. He didn’t offer any to Court. While this was going on the front door to the restaurant opened, and Jones’s driver rushed in, his eyes searching across the room to the table where Court and Jones now sat. There was a panic-stricken look on the man’s swollen face that did not diminish when Jones waved the man over to the bar to sit next to the bodyguard.

After he’d downed several more sips, Jones continued. “I don’t like you, mate, but I do like your style. I’ll give you what you’re after. The solicitor’s name is Terry Cassidy. He contacted me, put me in touch with the bloke who paid me for Kent’s involvement. A bloke who didn’t give a name, but he was an Ivan, for certain.”

“He was Russian?” Court clarified.

“Aye. I should have known from the start. I know fuck-all about the plan, the reasons behind it, who the prisoner was. Never met the Ivan face to face. All done over the phone.”

“Terry Cassidy knew to come to you for a shooter?”

“Shooters and muscle. He’s a middleman. You know the score, lad. You lot, head knockers, I mean, aren’t bringing in the money unless you’re bashin’ in faces or pullin’ out pistols. I farm out me boys for the goin’ rate. Last night was a bigger scheme, I knew that much, so I got triple for poor Kent.”

Court asked, “If this guy was Russian mob in London, why did he hire muscle from a crime firm in Nottingham?”

Jones waved a dismissive hand in the air. “They do it all the time. The Russian mafia likes to hire proper Englishmen to do some of its dirty work. Keeps them off the radar of the Yard and the Met.”

Court nodded, reached across the table, and shook Jones’s hand. It occurred to him that if Jones had any inkling that the man sitting with him had killed all seven of his people this morning, Court wouldn’t be leaving this bar alive. “Thank you, sir.”

“What you gonna do now?”

He downed the last of the wine in Jones’ glass. “I’m getting up and going out through the kitchen, and I’m hoping your lads don’t shoot me in the back.”

“I’ll see they behave. Then what?”

“Then I’m going to London.”

“Yeah? Well, if I learn you talked, I’ll start callin’ around. I’ll find out who you’re with, where you are. I’ll come at you with everything I got. Do we have an understanding?”

“A perfect understanding, Mr. Jones. Thank you very much, indeed.” Court stood and headed for the kitchen. Every step of the way he felt more certain someone was about to stop him, to grab him, to pull a weapon on him.

But he made it to and through the door, and five minutes later he was running an SDR through the streets of Nottingham, making sure he was clean before he grabbed a train to the capital.

* * *

• • •

The Cessna Sovereign jet lifted into a cloudy Virginia sky at four thirty p.m., with a flight plan filed for Greenland and a stop in Newfoundland along the way. Zoya Zakharova sat in the copilot’s seat, doing her best to acquaint herself with the gauges, dials, and computer screens.

With only 110 hours in single-engine fixed-wings, and not a single minute flying multis, she was by no means an experienced pilot, but she knew that with a little familiarization with the cockpit she’d be able to monitor systems when Arkady Kravchenko took breaks throughout the crossing.

By leaving America, she’d slipped the noose of CIA and FBI, who would be searching the D.C. area for her, and she’d managed to avoid the hit team that showed up at her safe house just as she was in the process of escaping.

But neither of these facts was involved with the initial reason for today’s clandestine exodus.

No. Something had occurred to her while lying in bed back in her holding room, obsessing over the photos of her father in Dagestan. Something that caused her to break out of American custody, to impersonate an active SVR officer to reboot a defunct asset to help her get out of the country.

Something that forced her to travel to London. Now.

She’d been so mission focused since the moment she’d sat up in her bed in her holding room, the realization of what she’d seen in the file Brewer handed her only then occurring to her, that she had barely stopped to think about the deeper meaning of what she’d learned. But facing over fifteen hours in the air, her thoughts returned to the photos.

And now, just like in the holding room, an icy chill shot down her back.

Zoya Zakharova was thirty-three years old, but she fought against emotions that brought her back to her childhood. She tried to shake them off, but the ramifications of all this for her were just too big.

She didn’t know how everything, how anything, would play out in the coming days and weeks on this quest she had begun late last night. The odds were long, to be sure. But she had to push forward because she knew one thing now that she did not know before she saw the file on her father.

She now knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that her father did not die fourteen years ago in Dagestan. He was alive in the photo, it had been staged, she assumed he was alive now, and she knew where to go to find out answers about where he was and what he was doing.