Waldo’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and it was the dedicated buzz that meant the message was on a coded channel and therefore official business. He checked the screen and saw the text was from Agent Orange. Short and sweet: Coming up.
Great, thought Waldo, twisting his gray beard to a point. Another fly in our overcrowded ointment.
The doorbell to the suite chimed, and half a dozen agents instantly threw various combat shapes, training their weapons on every flickering shadow.
“At ease, storm troopers,” said Waldo drily, crossing the small lobby to the intercom. “It’s one of our own.”
Waldo Gunn knew that he would probably choose to retire when this post went belly up. There was no way he could integrate with an office full of gun monkeys after twenty years of culture at Covent Garden.
The intercom screen showed a single figure outside the door.
Waldo pressed the talk button. “Identification, please.”
The man glared at the camera, as though reaching into his pocket was an inconvenience he didn’t have time for, then sighed and pulled out his badge, flipping it close to the lens.
It was Agent Orange, all right. Not a great photograph, but definitely the same man.
Maybe so, thought Waldo. But the FBI doesn’t operate on mugshots in our own facilities anymore. Why would we, when we have biometrics?
“Thumb on the scanner, please,” he ordered curtly.
“Really?” said the man with Agent Orange’s FBI badge and card. “I’m in a hurry here. Don’t want to be stuck in the cold just because some bucket of bolts can’t read my digit.”
“Thumb on the scanner, if you please,” insisted Waldo, not bothering to argue. If Orange was in a hurry, he should simply press the glass and be done with it.
“You’re the boss for now,” said Orange, and he placed his right thumb on the scanner bar, which took about five seconds longer than usual before matching the print to the one on file.
“See?” said Waldo. “That wasn’t so difficult. It’s just protocol.”
Waldo opened the door and shivered as a chill wrapped itself around his legs.
Must be a window open, he thought. I could have sworn I closed them all.
“The legendary Agent Waldo Gunn,” said Agent Orange, extending a hand. “Protector of lost sheep.”
“Legendary in certain circles,” said Waldo. He shook the offered hand and thought involuntarily, I don’t trust this man’s hand.
Waldo could not help glancing down. He noticed that Orange’s fingers were slim as a girl’s and the nails were as long.
Why the instinctive dislike? wondered Waldo, and then he remembered one of his mother’s various long-winded sayings: Never trust a man with long nails, unless he’s a guitar picker. A long-nailed man has never done a day’s work in his life, not honest work at any rate.
Orange relinquished Waldo’s hand and stared over his shoulder into the suite.
“Quite a gathering you have here, Waldo,” he said, his Scottish accent making the sentence five seconds longer than it would usually be.
That accent would drive me crazy, thought Waldo. It could take all day to finish a conversation.
“What can I do for you, Agent Orange?”
Orange’s smile was wide and thin. “Isn’t it obvious? I need you to release the suspects into my custody.”
Waldo bristled at the idea, which was so outlandish that he initially thought Orange was joking. “Your custody? That’s hardly procedure. These are suspects in an investigation. You are not an investigator.”
Orange seemed saddened by this attitude. “Perhaps not, but I do outrank you, Waldo.”
Suddenly Waldo did not appreciate this man calling him by his first name. “That’s Special Agent Gunn, if you please. And for your information, nobody outranks me in this suite. As officer in charge, I can trump the president himself if I deem it necessary. At any rate, the Assistant Director is on his way, and he has ordered that nobody interfere with the subjects until he arrives.”
“But they killed my entire hazmat team!” objected Orange. “No quarter was given, though it was asked. I was lucky to escape with my life.”
No quarter was given, thought Waldo. Quaint choice of words. “You do seem remarkably alive. And unscathed, too. Where are the bodies?”
Orange coughed into his fist. “That’s delicate and strictly need to know. It’s connected to our operation, which is about fifteen grades above your security clearance. I could tell you, but then . . .”
“You’d have to kill me,” said Waldo, completing the hackneyed phrase.
“And your family,” added Orange, straight-faced.
Waldo’s instinctive dislike of this Scot burned brighter. “There’s no call to be rude. We have a procedure in place here, and that’s the end of it. You may wait in the lounge if you wish, but there will be no contact with the suspects. After all, we only have your word for it that the detainees are guilty of anything.”
Orange’s smile never wavered. “That’s an excellent point. Unfortunately, I am not in a mood to be detained at the moment, and as you pointed out, you outrank me only inside the suite. And I am outside. So I shall partake of another excellent coffee from the establishment across the street and return later when the big-knob bluebottle has joined the party.” Orange stopped suddenly and his eyes brightened as though lit from within. “Can it be?” he cried, his accent suddenly less Scottish. “Why, I swear that it is.”
Waldo was reluctantly intrigued. “What is? It is what?”
Orange gazed past the suite’s custodian into the room itself. “Blow me if I haven’t been here before.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” said Waldo in the most patronizing tone he could muster. “I have a log of every single person who has set foot across this threshold in the past twenty years, and you are not on it.”
Orange was so de
lighted that he actually clapped his hands. “This was years ago, Waldo. Many years ago. If I remember it right, an exceedingly dodgy character answered the landlord’s rap in those days.”
“Fascinating story, really. But if you won’t come in, you must leave. Security and all that.”
Orange doffed his cap, revealing a head of hair that seemed gray or black depending on the incline of his head. “And all that, indeed, Waldo. A quick coffee bath for the ivories, and I shall return. Watch for me, won’t you?”
Neither man offered his hand upon parting, but Waldo Gunn flicked through different camera views on the security screen so that he could watch Orange all the way to Monmouth Street.
“I will watch for you, Agent Orange,” he said between his teeth. “You give your ivories their coffee bath, and I will watch for you like a hawk.”
Waldo placed a hand on his round stomach, the result of too many fried Cumberland sausages and late night hot chocolates with Chantilly swirls.
What is that feeling? he wondered, trying to match an emotion to the acid churning in his belly.
Waldo Gunn realized that, for the first time in twenty years, he did not feel safe in his own fortress.
Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. Orange is a disconcerting character, that is all. He’s not dangerous.
But Waldo Gunn’s subconscious was trying to tell him something, and the portly agent really should have listened.
• • •
Garrick ignored the coffee shop and virtually skipped down the Garden’s service alley, still hardly crediting his good fortune at having previously cracked this establishment.
He found that he could roll through his memory like a moving-picture show and find each frame as clear as reality, smells and all.
He remembered this house well. In his day, a flourishing bootmaker’s shop had stood on the ground floor, with a brass plate in the window claiming Charles Dickens himself as a patron, which was difficult to contest as by then the great novelist had been dead for nigh on a decade.
Above the bootmaker’s lived the dodgy character with a curious name. Billtong . . . no . . . Billtoe, that was it. George Billtoe had passed a sheaf of homemade pound notes in Barnet Horse Fair and incurred the wrath of a certain gang, who did not appreciate their turf being poached without ask nor license. The gang’s wrath was embodied in the form of Albert Garrick.