Page 57

‘Is it your plane or a lease?’ Koenig asked Draper.

‘Long-term lease.’

‘Bells and whistles?’

‘It has everything.’

‘Can you arrange for the missing person reports on Bess’s academics to be emailed to the plane? And try to get the police files on the people she thinks were murdered.’

‘I thought you said staging three murders was a tall order.’

‘Until I can rule it out, I’m ruling it in.’

‘I assume you don’t want me going through Smerconish for this?’

‘We keep the circle as small as we can.’

Draper nodded. ‘I’ll call my operations manager. He’s been with me from the start, and I trust him completely. He’ll get us everything there is.’

The door opened. Carlyle walked in. A gust of wind followed her. It rattled a newspaper and blew Draper’s hair into her eyes.

‘Did you see Margaret?’ Koenig said. ‘She went looking for you.’

‘I must have missed her.’

Carlyle took a seat. She drained the teapot. Managed to get half a cup of lukewarm tea. She threw it down her neck like a shot of Jack. The door opened again. More wind. Margaret stepped in. She shut the door. The wind stopped.

‘Ah, there you are, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘You must have taken the scenic route back.’

‘I needed to think.’

Margaret glanced at Koenig and Draper. ‘She does that sometimes,’ she said. ‘I’ve told her, self-indulgence is not at all British. Imagine if Churchill had taken scenic walks instead of bullying you Yanks into joining the war. We’d all be speaking German. So please, less of that nonsense, Elizabeth. And I bet you’ve forgotten the eggs.’

‘The store was shut. We’ll have to make do.’

‘We’re wheels up in ten hours,’ Koenig said. ‘We’ll eat on the plane.’

Draper passed Koenig his SIG. The weapon he’d thought was Draper’s. He put the firing pin back in. He grabbed the empty shell casing from the bullet Draper had fired into the ceiling. He filled the base with candle wax, slotted it into the SIG’s chamber, and dry-fired it. The impression in the wax was deep and true. It was the next best thing to firing the weapon.

Koenig preferred Glocks to SIGs. They were both good weapons. Accurate and reliable. Decent magazine capacity. He preferred Glocks because they were smaller, lighter and easier to conceal. The Glock’s boxy shape wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the SIG, but who the hell cared what a tool looked like? He still liked SIGs, though, and had trained extensively with them. Like the Glock, the SIG had no safety to disengage. It was ready to fire. All you had to do was point it at the bad guy and squeeze the trigger.