‘Like old times.’
‘Like old times,’ she repeated.
He shouldered a bag. ‘So, is this a private thing or a big Bureau welcome?’
‘Bit of both. Clever compromise.’
A nod, a smile. ‘I’m glad.’
‘Someone had to hold your hand, keep an eye on you. I volunteered.’ They began to walk to the exit. ‘The city isn’t a pleasant place to be right now.’
‘Trouble in Paradise, huh?’
‘Worse by the day. You’ll see it in the police roadblocks and vehicle checks, on the news flashes. At least I’ve still got my fantasy of retiring to Oregon.’
‘To farm cherries?’ He laughed. ‘That old one.’
‘You remember?’
‘Couldn’t forget.’ They pushed their way through, lapsed into the flow, without ebb, of easy and seamless conversation. Unconscious communication, conscious effort to avoid mutual subject hazards. Confronting demons and demarcation lines could wait. They reached the Cherokee.
‘What happened to the chick with the BMW soft-top image?’ he asked.
‘Another casualty of the deteriorating situation.’ She unlocked. ‘Climb in.’
‘You haven’t asked where I’m staying.’
‘You haven’t asked where I’m taking you.’ She rested a hand on her hip, used the other to extract and position sunglasses. Tentativeness behind the actions, sudden nervousness behind the lenses. ‘I don’t want to bounce you into anything, make you feel uncomfortable, Josh …’
‘Playa del Rey?’ He thought for a moment; she bit her lower lip involuntarily. ‘Makes perfect sense.’
The traffic was heavy, slowing to motionless by the police cordon pulling over drivers for spot searches with dogs and detectors. Engines and emotions were overheating, the protests of angry parents and tired children faint and persistent through the tinted glass. An exercise to reassert their presence, reassure the public. It simply pissed the public off.
‘Overkill,’ Kemp observed.
Krista adjusted the air-con. ‘A law and order speciality. Both are suffering.’
‘Try London. Conditions are right to exploit, ripe to explode.’
‘It’s why Al Azania and his kind are circling like vultures, why I’m packing heat.’
‘How was your meeting with Big Al?’
‘In a word, unsatisfactory. He’s plainly saving his voice for the Million Clenched Fists rally in DC.’
‘Any reaction when he saw the video still of our suspect from the Caribbean?’
‘Inconclusive.’
Kemp began to whistle softly, then broke off. ‘Ever heard the one about the Jamaican, South African and the Californian connection?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Me neither. And the punch line’s sure as hell a mystery.’
‘I guarantee it’ll be unpleasant.’
‘So speaks someone who survived an aerial attack.’ He watched as a fat man in tight T-shirt remonstrated with an officer. ‘The more I know about the opposition, the more I believe you.’
‘They’re professional, political, impenetrable, financed; their routines are choreographed and superbly executed.’
‘Financed and impenetrable. It’s a contradiction.’
‘Which puts them in a historic and alien category of their own.’
‘And puts us on alert.’ The fat man was spreadeagled across the bonnet of his car, corpulence wriggling, face straining away from the searing metal.
‘You think we should have seen them coming?’
‘It’s a question for the politicians.’
‘We’re the ones expected to give the answers.’ She rolled down the window, prepared to flash ID. ‘Some kind of crap about protecting the Constitution.’
‘Where d’you learn unhealthy attitudes like that?’
Her eyes shifted, expressed amusement. ‘From you.’
‘I’m flattered.’ He massaged his neck, slumped lower as the effects of long-distance travel kicked in. ‘Just hope you didn’t inherit my inability to crack the case.’
