Deep Black - Andy McNab [14]
I turned towards the window, looking through the gloom in the direction of his office to have my daily mimic. ‘Do you have any idea what that might mean, Nick?’
Chewing on the sandwich, I shoved what was left in the air at him. ‘Shove it up your arse.’
‘That’s ass, Nick – you’re an American now.’
I rooted round in the empty boxes on the worktop but with no luck. I was out of teabags but not out of pills. I had nine big bottles of the stuff Ezra prescribed me. I told him I was taking them but, fuck it, I didn’t want that shit inside me. I had enough problems with the Branston.
I was going to have to haul my fat arse out of the flat and down to the Brit shop in Georgetown that all the embassy boys went to. All Brits hate the fancy teabags on a string they try to fob you off with in the States. They taste terrible and there’s hardly anything in them anyway. What I wanted was monkey tea, the sort you can stand your teaspoon up in, the sort that comes out of a plumber’s Thermos looking like hot chocolate. But, then, could I really be bothered? Probably not. Depending on what George had to say, I could be leaving today. Where would I plug in my kettle then?
I thought about taking a shower, but fuck it. I just ran the kitchen tap and threw some water on my hair to tame the Johnny Rotten look, and pulled my trainers on.
On the way to the Metro I grabbed a Danish and got it down me before I reached Crystal City station. Eating, drinking, smoking – you name it, you can’t do it on the Washington Metro.
A few minutes later, as the pristine aluminium train rumbled under the capital, I found myself thinking about the guy on the news. Whatever problem he’d had, it was over now. He’d got it sorted.
I didn’t care what happened to me, but Ezra was right: if I really thought that way, I’d have already done it. I would never take that route. I could still remember the feeling I got when other ex-Regiment guys killed themselves, and it wasn’t envy, pity or anything else. It was just anger, big-time, for leaving someone else to pick up the pieces. Sometimes I’d had to sort out their kit before it went back to the next of kin. It was important there weren’t any letters from girlfriends or anything else from their secret lives to embarrass the family. I remembered burning letters to one particular guy, thinking they were from a girlfriend. When I took the rest of his kit round to his wife she burst into tears. How could Al not have kept any of the love letters she signed off as Fizz, his pet name for her?
Then I thought about all the insurance policies that were invalid because some selfish fucker had taken an overdose. If you’ve decided to do it, and you’re sane enough to stockpile painkillers or whatever, why not go out and do a couple of freefalls and just forget to dump the canopy on the third jump?
Worst of all was the effect on the kids they left behind. How could anyone be so selfish that they ignored the price their families had to pay? The guy on the TV, I wondered – had he got a wife, kids, parents, brothers, sisters? What if, like me, they’d watched the whole thing on TV?
If I took the easy way out, at least it’d make fuck-all difference to anyone else’s life.
But I wasn’t going to. I had other plans.
13
The sun was out at last, but I could still see my breath as I walked along Beach Street. It was ten to eleven and I was a couple of blocks south of the Library of Congress. That meant I’d have to slow down if I was going to be late. It was important for George to see everything was normal.
The other foot traffic eyed me as if I was driving at five miles an hour on the freeway. They rushed along in trainers with their office shoes in their bags, heads down and cellphones stuck to their ears so the world knew they were doing really important stuff. Everyone, men and women, seemed to be dressed in the same make of dark grey raincoat.
I sipped at the hole in the Starbucks