He looked at the bodies again and resented them. But he was alive, and they were not. He told himself he should accept that fact as though it were a triumph. He didn’t imagine there would be any other triumphs this trip. Before long, he would probably be cornered, and then dead too.
When he was still forty miles out from Manchester, he put the battery back in his phone and used it to make a reservation for the next flight to Sydney, which would leave at 8:00 a.m. He knew the Manchester Airport was south of the city center, but the details were fuzzy, so he used the map function, which showed him that he needed to get on the M56. He memorized the route, took the battery out again, and drove harder and faster.
It was a bit after 4:00 a.m. now, and at this hour there were no delays. Once he switched to the main highways, most of the traffic was fast-moving trucks heading for the city to deliver the thousands of products that would be unloaded into the stores that morning.
In less than an hour he was on the M56 passing signs that directed him to the big parking lots for the airport. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, put on the knitted watch cap he had taken from one of the dead men in the dining room at York, and tugged it down to his eyes. He patted the body beside him and found a pair of tinted sunglasses. The man behind him had a scarf in his pocket with no blood on it, so he took that too, wrapped it around the lower part of his face, then drove on. He picked the first airport lot he saw, pulled in, took a ticket from the machine, and then drove to a remote section of the lot, where he parked the Bentley with the grille aimed off toward an empty field. A sign said there was a shuttle to the airport every fifteen minutes.
He opened the trunk, and took his suitcase out, then spent a few minutes wiping down the car to get rid of his fingerprints. When he looked around him, there seemed to be nobody else waiting for the shuttle. Most of these cars must have been left here in the lot yesterday or even earlier. He walked away from the Bentley and its four dead passengers and toward the farthest sign for a shuttle stop.
5
If anyone was aware of where he’d driven from York, they hadn’t caught up yet, but he had to be alert and keep his eyes open. First, he needed to get to the terminal without attracting any attention. The shuttle would probably not be full at this hour and would probably make the rounds of every lot on the way. He would have to be patient. Nothing raised suspicion among watchers like impatience. Fugitives, terrorists, and thieves all felt each second like the stab of a needle, and today he would too. He couldn’t show it.
In America there were always at least three sets of watchers at major airports. The local police forces always had older retired police officers there to watch for criminals and their bosses. The Mafia watched for people they were interested in—each other or the up-and-coming types who were working to replace them. The third group were thieves. They watched for women who set their purses or carry-on bags on seats around them, for people who didn’t pick up their bags right away when they came out of the X-ray machines or lost track of a bag in the bathroom. They would sometimes pick suitcases off the carousels at baggage claim. If a traveler caught them, they’d say they worked for the airline. He hadn’t flown out of the UK often, but he knew that British airports had the equivalent. He was eager to get past all those people and onto a plane.
Meg had bought his bag as a companion to one of hers. It was a leather carry-on, designed to take a few worries out of travel. It had several zippered pockets on the outside and a shoulder strap consisting of leather sewn around a steel cable, so a thief couldn’t slash it and run off with the bag. This morning he carried it with the strap on his shoulder and kept his hands in his coat pockets as he waited.
Waiting to be taken to a place he hadn’t wanted to go reminded him of working with Eddie Mastrewski. Eddie had told him, “If you’re not sure what’s there, don’t make a mad dash for the city. You can always sneak up on it. Go most of the way there and then stop to look around. Go past the neighborhood where you’re supposed to do the job. If there are people hanging around like they’re waiting for something, turn around and drive out of town. What they’re waiting for is you.”
Michael had an American passport in the name Paul Foster. It was a relic of his last trip to the United States seven years ago. He had used it only once, and it had been intended for only that single use, to get him out of the United States. It had been obtained at a risk by someone who had owed him a big favor. He had not intended to ever use it again, but he had kept it, aware that he couldn’t predict the future.
The time was weighing on his nerves, so he forced himself to think about other things. He had found that since getting older, he had a surprising number of unexpected thoughts and feelings. He didn’t like the prediction that in five billion years the earth would succumb to the sun’s gravity, fall into it, and burn up. This was surprising because it raised the possibility that he cared about Man, not just a few people. It put him in the category of the ants, which did brave and strenuous things while in the process of dying to preserve not just some ants but Ant. He had lived a life without being aware of species loyalty, partly because at no time after he was fifteen had he been confident of living for long.
Sometimes it seemed to him that he had lived a long life—and done it with surprising success—without having learned anything about why things were as they were. He had met a beautiful and brilliant young Englishwoman by pure chance one day while he was trying to stay invisible in the ancient city of Bath. They had been attracted to each other in the first minutes, and became lovers just hours after that. Life-threatening circumstances that surprised even him—the attack at the Brighton races—had made the two of them cling to each other like drowning swimmers, and they had never relinquished each other since. He had experienced all those years with her and had never stopped being amazed and grateful that this woman, the Honourable Margaret Holroyd, now O.B.E., had given herself over to his keeping, allowed herself without visible hesitation to love him, and stayed faithful, loyal, and constant.
He was frustrated that after so much time he still didn’t know much about women in general, or about Meg. She never overtly told him anything about her motives, her fantasies or desires, or what she really thought about him. All he knew was what had happened between them, and she seemed to think it was all he was entitled to know. He hoped that right now she was already safe in the house of one of her friends.
The sky was still dark as a misty rain began to fall, putting tiny droplets on the windows of the cars nearby and turning the lot into a vast wet black pavement.
After waiting about ten minutes, he assured himself that the shuttle would appear in another five. He knew that the shuttle had to enter at one of the entrances, and guessed it wouldn’t drive past a man standing in the rain, so he decided to walk toward the entrance he could see.
He took a few steps toward the end of the aisle and heard an engine behind him.
The engine was too loud. Michael had lived a long time by not assuming that things weren’t dangerous. He looked over his shoulder only once to locate the car and chart its speed and direction. He thought, This might be nothing. But the car had passed a number of open spaces and hadn’t taken one. It hadn’t moved toward a different part of the lot, or chosen one to begin with. It had turned to go up the same aisle as the only pedestrian in the lot.