Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [129]
“Good,” said Littleton. “Go down, take her to the limo. I’ll meet you there.”
“You sure? I could just take her for a ride. Very treacherous roads tonight. Accidents could happen.”
“No,” said Littleton. “We need to know who she is first.”
“Her name is not Lisa Horne, that much is for sure.”
“If she’s an investigative journalist chasing rabbit holes, that’s one thing. If she has some other agenda, I want to get to the bottom of it.”
“Whoever she is, she knows too much.”
“That may be,” said Littleton. He turned back to the window, thinking. The gist of the warning from London replayed in his head: I have my exit strategy. You need yours.
“Get the limo,” he said, watching his own reflection in the window. “And let’s be quick about this.”
Chapter Seventy
Jack lay awake in the glow of his smart phone.
The text message from Chuck had made it impossible to sleep, and Jack made the mistake of surfing the Internet to numb his brain. For the heck of it, he followed up on Andie’s conversation with Grandpa Swyteck and searched “General Petrak.” He could have spent all night reading about the daring plot of the Czech resistance to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s planned successor, and how the general in exile coordinated it from the U.K. It didn’t make them Jewish, but Jack hoped that there was something to his grandfather’s ramblings, that perhaps they were somehow related to this Petrak—but that was for another day.
He put the phone away and closed his eyes. He wasn’t dreaming—sleep that deep didn’t come so soon—but in his mind’s eye he saw himself at Brookfield Zoo with his grandfather. He was five years old and enthralled by the polar bear exhibit. Suddenly, Grandpa was gone. Jack was alone and surrounded by strangers.
He shot up in bed and grabbed his smart phone. Jack had been getting lost in strange places since childhood. Tailing Shada would require a working knowledge of the area, and Jack spent the next hour studying maps of the East End. In Miami, the rule was CRAP: Courts, roads, avenues, and places flowed north and south—top to bottom—like the stuff we get from our bosses. As best Jack could tell, the only way to make sense of London was to ask, “Which way to the nearest tube?”
“It’s five o’clock,” said Reza. He was outside the door.
Jack couldn’t believe it. “Be right down,” he said.
Jack went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He’d had no sleep in the last twenty-four hours and about five hours total—thankfully, he’d slept on the flight from Miami—in the last thirty-six. He’d tried murder cases on less rest. Another two hours tonight would have been just enough to revive the jet lag. A quick shower brought him to life, and he was downstairs in fifteen minutes.
The kitchen was already bustling. The Banglatown Curry Shop was a traditional Bengali restaurant where spices were ground by hand and mountains of vegetables were chopped with pride and precision. One team filleted the morning’s delivery of fresh fish, while another cut whole chickens into parts. Two men by the wood-burning oven were arguing in their native tongue, and Jack guessed it had something to do with the cooking temperature.
“Hungry?” asked Reza as he handed Jack a plate. It was fruit, a multigrain bread, and yogurt. Jack thanked him as they headed down the hall, but before they reached the locked door to the storage room, Reza pulled him into a tiny office and closed the door. “Shada is already inside,” said Reza, “so let me be quick. Chuck is going to extend an olive branch and tell her which bill has the GPS in it.”
That didn’t jibe with last night’s text message from Chuck, but Jack kept quiet, not sure if Reza knew about the exchange.
“Of course, there will be a second