The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [131]
Not yet. His mobile is vibrating. London.
“Talk quickly,” he tells Sobel.
“They found North’s car.”
“What about North?”
“Traces of blood but no body.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“We have to consider the possibility.”
Chalcott scoops peanuts into his fist and inhales them between sentences. A stewardess leans over him.
“Excuse me, sir, but all electronic devices must be turned off for take-off.”
Chalcott waves her away. “What about Terracini?”
“He’s being monitored.”
“Has anything else changed?”
“We’re still looking for the girl.”
“Are you a religious man, Brendan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maybe you should say a prayer.”
He hangs up. Turns off his phone. Closes his eyes. In seven hours he’ll be in London and he can sort out this mess. So far he’s given his superiors a minimalist rendering of the situation. Two lessons he’s learned from twenty years with the Agency—refuse to recognize anything is amiss and keep your answers short.
Ibrahim is cleaning up. He’s hired himself an assassin, but this hasn’t changed the game. Every side has men who kill for a cause, but it’s easier dealing with a hired gun than a teenager with a hard-on for heavenly virgins and a vest packed full of explosives.
Money or God—some motives are easier to understand.
14
LONDON
The Financial Herald has floor-to-ceiling glass doors and a marbled lobby fringed with indoor gardens. A lone security guard sits behind a brightly lit island counter. Gooding waves his ID card in front of a scanner and signs Luca into the register before handing him a visitor’s pass.
A lift rises above the foyer until the security guard is only a bald spot five floors below. Gooding scans his ID again to enter the newsroom. Lights trigger as they weave between cluttered desks and colored partitions that are pinned with newspaper clippings, cartoons and calendars. At the far end of the newsroom a subs desk is pooled in light and half a dozen men sit behind oversized computer screens. Most have hunched shoulders, midnight tans and the tics and twitches of ex-smokers.
Nearby the night news editor is poring over copies of the first editions, seeing what stories their rivals are running. What did they miss? Who scooped whom? It’s too late now to make any major changes. Only a big breaking event would warrant stopping the presses and dropping in a new front page.
Luca’s father had been a sub-editor on a paper in Chicago back in the hot-metal days when the printing presses would shake the entire building like a distant earthquake. Every line of type was cast in molten metal—an alloy of lead, antimony and tin—before being wedged into metal galleys on stone tables.
Luca was seven years old when he was first taken down on to “the stone.” The setters were rough-looking men in ink-stained overalls with paper hats folded from newsprint. His father would lean over the galleys, subbing the raised lead type, reading stories back to front and upside down faster than most people read normally. He cut paragraphs, trimmed sentences, added fillers and corrected mistakes.
New technology put paid to the setters and linotype machines. Now it is all done by computers in sterile, temperature-controlled rooms without the screaming machines and clanking metal.
Gooding’s desk is protected by partitions that block everything except the view from his window across the rooftops. Luca had pressed him for access to the newspaper’s archives and library. Initially, Gooding had hesitated, which puzzled Luca. Something about the journalist’s lugubrious face had registered too little when they were talking about the missing banker. Daniela had been awake to the deficit, catching the subtle change in Gooding’s tone.
“He’s not telling you everything,” she whispered to Luca as he hailed her a cab. “Be careful.” Then she had peppered his face with kisses. “I think