“I might have an idea,” Nick said.
* * *
Nick, Kate, and Hannon sat in a conference room, high above the streets of London.
“I was ten years old,” Nick said. “The man who came to visit us, he gave me an SAS pin.”
Hannon listened to every word, and the look on his face made it crystal clear he wasn’t buying any of it. “If this man was in the regiment, he never would have said so. That’s the first rule.”
“First rule of Fight Club, never talk about Fight Club?” Nick said.
Hannon looked at him like he had no idea what Nick was talking about.
“He didn’t say a word about being in the SAS,” Nick said. “But who else would have a pin like that?”
“Nobody.”
“That’s what I thought. And you just told us five minutes ago that this chute definitely came from the SAS. So why not follow up on it?”
“What was this man’s name?” Hannon asked.
“It was a long time ago. But it was an unusual name. Something that sounded funny to me at the time. I think there’s a chance I’d recognize it if I saw it.”
“There’s anywhere from four hundred to six hundred active members at any one time.”
“If we know the year, can you show me the active roster?”
It was obvious Hannon didn’t love the idea. He thought it over for a moment and finally gave in. Using the year that Nick was ten years old, he went off to another room to find the roster.
“This sounds like a long shot,” Kate said. “There must be some other way you can contact your father.”
“I tried calling him. His phone is dead. I called his neighbor, too, and he said the house has been empty for weeks.”
Hannon came back into the room with a roster sheet. “You’ll see we’re divided into four squadrons,” he said. “Each squadron has four troops, led by a captain. The troops have specialties. Mobility, Mountain, Boat, and Air. The Air lads use most of the parachutes, no surprise, so that’s where I’d start.”
Nick went through the names in each squadron list, focusing on the air troops. There were sixteen names in each Air Troop, sixty-four in all. He stopped and closed his eyes like he was transporting himself back to a ten-year-old version of himself, hearing his father’s friend being introduced to him. A friend with a cool British accent and an unusual name.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “It’s just not jumping out at me.”
Hannon took back the list and looked at the names. “I know most of these men. I’ll be honest, Mr. Fox. I find it hard to believe that any one of them would help train your father, much less modify a chute so he could make a clean getaway from a robbery at the Vatican. I’m not surprised you didn’t find a name here, because I still don’t believe a single word of this.”
“I understand why you’d say that,” Nick said. “I’m just going by what I remember.”
“Memory’s a funny thing. I won’t hold it against you, sir.”
“We appreciate your help,” Kate said. “I’ll report to Interpol that you did everything you could for us.”
Hannon made an effort not to laugh at that. To him, Interpol was nothing but a bunch of computer geeks and pencil pushers, with tin badges and popguns.
“I’ll see you out,” he said. “And good luck finding your man.”
* * *
They had booked two rooms at a hotel in the West End, near Covent Garden. It was still early in the evening, but they were both exhausted and jet-lagged. Nick passed on a nightcap and Kate was grateful, but suspicious.
As soon as Nick was alone in his room, he opened up his laptop and started searching. Thirty minutes later, he opened the door quietly, looked up and down the hallway, and stepped very softly past Kate’s room, toward the elevator.
In another few minutes, he was down on Monmouth Street, hailing a taxi. Thirty seconds later, Kate hailed her own, and told the driver to follow the taxi in front of them.
“I’m going to kill him,” she said. She kept saying it over and over, until the driver gave her a funny look and she made herself stop.
They stayed on Nick’s tail, through the city, onto Whitechapel Road. There were a few anxious moments, making their way through the evening traffic and trying to keep in contact with a single taxi that looked like any other. Finally, Nick’s taxi turned down a narrow residential street and came to a stop. Kate watched Nick get out. She threw some pound notes at the driver and did the same. She was a block away, partially hidden in the shadows between streetlamps.
Now she had a choice to make. Go strangle the man, or wait and watch. She decided to wait and watch.
After five minutes of standing in the shadows, she started to get that old feeling, which had never failed her, that she was being watched herself.
* * *
Nick stood down the street from the address he’d given to the driver. The owner of this little row house was a retired SAS captain named Richard Duckworth. It had been half a lie that he didn’t know the name. He remembered the man calling himself “Duckie,” and then that half lie was followed by a full lie when he scanned the list of names and acted like a man coming up empty. In truth, the name had jumped right out at him, and the fact that he had been the Air Troop captain for B Squadron clinched it. The man he had met when he was ten years old, and who might have given his father the parachute, lived in this row house.
Nick’s first order of business was to come up with a plan, a script, and possibly a character. Or maybe this was the one time when he should play it straight? Just tell the man he was the son of Quentin Fox and needed to talk to him?
Because that’s really all he was doing here. He felt bad leaving Kate behind, but he was certain that if he could just get five minutes with his father, alone, he could find out the truth. Without the truth, there was no way to know what to do next. Return the map. Give his dad to the authorities. Or go hunt for treasure.
Nick was halfway to the door when it opened. Two men came out. One was the same model of man he’d seen in the SAS headquarters, brick-wall solid, with a high and tight haircut. He may have been a little older, retired from service, but he couldn’t help but carry himself like a soldier. The second man was his father, and he was holding a hard metal tube about a foot long.
Nick knew this had to be the map.
Nick followed them several blocks, back to Whitechapel Road. He watched them enter a narrow two-story building that was tucked into the middle of the block. He gave them a minute, then carefully peeked into the little window set high on the front door. It was a pub, the kind of place meant only for the locals who’d been drinking there for most of their lives. There wasn’t even a sign on the front announcing the Bell & Crown or the Stag & Spit Bucket.
Nick stepped inside. There was a single rail of a bar running down one side of the room, with a rough-looking bartender on the other side. There was a game of “footie” on the “telly,” but nobody else but the bartender was watching it. There was no sign of Nick’s father or Duckworth.
The bartender stopped wiping a glass, looked at Nick as if he must have gotten himself seriously lost and walked through the wrong door. “Help ya, mate?”