Up on the third floor of the construction site, Reyland squatted by a concrete mixing tray as a muscular female MI6 agent slit open another piece of the white plastic construction scaffold wrapping.
She turned and handed him the binoculars.
From where Reyland peeked out, it was a level clear lane straight across Wilton to the embassy’s rear stairwell window where Dr. Santos would make the drop.
Reyland checked his watch. It was 11:25 a.m. Any minute now.
He looked at the dark window of the embassy, thinking about the doctor. What he had to be going through. The despair of betraying his patient and possibly going to jail warring with the hope of getting his son back.
Yes, that one hope, that tiny beam of light, was guiding him toward Messerly’s room at this very moment.
Reyland’s phone vibrated. He looked down.
It was an empty text from the good doctor. The signal.
He was by the window now.
“Keep your eyes peeled. It’s on,” Reyland said to the agent beside him.
In the end, it was almost ridiculous how easy it was. There was a sound of a window opening across the street, and then out of the window came a quad drone the size of a radio-controlled plane.
Then Reyland heard the embassy window shut as the agent leaned out of the panel slit.
“Gotcha,” she said.
“Are they there? Are they there?” Reyland said, and then his eyes lit up as the female agent dropped the thumb drives into his palm.
He gazed on them, three little smooth white slabs of plastic each no bigger than a gum eraser, Toshiba written on their sides.
Over this? he thought, shaking his head.
A year’s work. Millions spent. Lives lost. Over a gram of plastic and silicone?
“Time to go,” he said.
The line of his British security commando men waved Reyland west over the construction site roof like coaches at an obstacle course. He passed some aluminum framing beams, a pile of steel rods, a rolled-up hose. There was a stepladder that went up over the roof wall to the scaffolding on the Upper Belgrave side of the building, and Reyland went over it and started down the nine-story scaffold’s steps.
They were coming down the seventh-story flight of stairs when Reyland heard it. There was the high scream of a car engine on Upper Belgrave, and all five of them stopped on the stairs and went over to the street-side railing.
At first Reyland couldn’t see because of the plastic sheeting, but then he pulled at the plastic until he got it to part like a curtain.
Then he turned to the right.
Down Upper Belgrave came a huge white work truck flying like a runaway train.
It was a phone truck, Reyland could see, as it jumped the curb onto their block and came roaring up the sidewalk directly at them.
“Back! Back! Back!” Reyland cried.
Then the truck smashed somewhere down below into the scaffolding they were standing on, and Reyland yelled as he felt the stairs jolt and heave beneath his backpedaling feet.