THIRTEEN

“What are you doing?” I gasped.

“People with guns ask questions. People without guns do as they are told.” He raised the gun and aimed it right at me. “Now!”

I suddenly realized we weren’t alone. Another man, wearing a dark suit and darker sunglasses, was at the car door beside me. He was holding a pistol, and he looked vaguely familiar. He opened the door and motioned with the pistol for me to come. Slowly, with hands raised, I shuffled across the seat and out of the car, followed by Sir March and then Charlie.

“I—I don’t understand,” I stammered. “What’s going on?”

“It’s obvious, David. We’ve stumbled into a trap,” Sir March said. “Our driver obviously is a double agent.”

I looked at Jack.

“Not double agent, just agent,” he said.

The two men led us into one of the buildings. It was almost empty except for some long-abandoned industrial equipment, dirty, broken down and dusty. They took us to a smaller room. Here, things were very different. It was like stepping from one universe to another. This well-lit room was filled with new furniture, and there was a computer sitting on a desk. On the wall behind the desk was a bank of TV monitors. They showed images from closed-circuit cameras set up on the outside of the building. In one, I saw our cab parked in the alley.

“Sit,” Jack said, and the three of us sank into seats at one end of the room. The two men then went to the other end of the room and started talking in a foreign language.

“As I thought,” Sir March whispered. “Russian… they must be KGB.”

“Do you know what they’re saying?” Charlie whispered back.

“My Russian isn’t the best, but they seem to want some information. And I know they’ll be prepared to do whatever is needed to get that information.” He turned directly to me. “You’d know about that, though, wouldn’t you, David?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded my head in agreement. The two men stopped talking and came back to stand in front of us.

“Look, this is all some kind of mistake,” I said.

“Is it a mistake, Mr. Nigel Finch?” the second man asked.

The voice. It all came back to me. “You’re the man from by the river. I took your picture with your wife.”

“She is not my wife.”

“And that’s not really my name,” I said.

“We are aware of that,” Jack said. “We know who Mr. Finch is, and we also know that your name is McLean. What we don’t know is why you chose to use that name—Finch.”

“And believe me, you will tell us,” the second man said. “But first we will deal with the important things.”

He went and stood directly over Sir March. “And are we to believe that you are not Bernard March?”

“You can believe whatever you want to believe,” Sir March said. “I just want you to know that before we’re finished here, you’re going to regret the day you were born.”

Jack snickered. “Empty words.”

“We’ll see how funny it is once Winston lets Stalin know how you’ve been treating your allies.”

The two men turned to each other. They looked confused.

“He thinks it’s the forties and the war is still on,” I explained.

“We are aware. You! Get to your feet!” Jack grabbed Sir March and pulled him to his feet.

“Be careful—he’s old,” I said.

The other man pointed the gun directly at my head. “You be careful or you will not have a chance to become old.”

Jack led the old man away, leaving the three of us in the room.

“Look,” I said. “The girl has nothing to do with any of this. If you let her go, I’ll tell you everything.”

“You will tell us everything whether we let her go or not. She stays.”

“Okay, but can you at least tell me what the name Nigel Finch means to you?”

He shrugged. “To me it means nothing. It is a waste of time and resources to be chasing a phantom.”

“What do you mean, a phantom?”

“Maybe I don’t use the word right. A ghost from the past.”

“How far in the past?” I asked.

“Long before you were born and even before I was born,” he said.

“Then how did you even know to come looking for me?” I asked.

“There was increased traffic on the Internet,” he explained. “Many people started looking for certain significant names, obviously doing research.”

It was the Holmesians. It had to be. “The Cambridge Five were Russian agents feeding information to your government. Finch was the sixth,” I said.

“Go on.”

I suddenly realized that I’d been trying to get information out of him when in fact he was getting information out of me.

“I don’t know anything else. I just got caught up with these old geezers who belong to the Sherlock Holmes society thing. As far as I know, this Nigel Finch is just a character in a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“Really? And is that why you went and kidnapped the former director of MI6?” He laughed. “By the way, we should thank you for saving us the trouble of doing it ourselves.”

“You mean you were planning on kidnapping him?”

“His mind may be scrambled, but there are pieces up there”—he tapped his head—“that might be worth knowing. Kidnapping him makes sense, but you two are a waste of my time.”

“Sorry to inconvenience you.”

“You know somebody will realize we’re missing and call the police,” Charlie said.

“The police will not even take a missing-person report until the person has been missing for at least twenty-four hours. Even then, they will think it is two young people going off for a little fun around the holidays.”

“My parents know I wouldn’t do that,” Charlie said.

“Then they can look. This is a big city, and we are very isolated here. Now I want silence.”

I watched on the closed-circuit screens as day turned to night. Two others had come in and brought us all cold fish and chips. We’d been allowed to get up, stretch and go to the washroom, with a guard stationed outside the windowless toilet. Twice Jack had come back, but we hadn’t seen Sir March.

I was afraid to think about what was happening to him and even more afraid of what it might lead to when it was my turn to be questioned. What exactly was I supposed to tell them when I didn’t know anything? Well, anything except the fact that my grandfather might have been the Russian agent they were looking for. No, wait—if they were looking for him, that meant they didn’t know where he’d gone or what had become of him. Maybe he wasn’t a Russian agent but somebody who was tricking them into thinking he was a traitor. That would make him a triple agent instead of a double agent. Wouldn’t that be better?

I looked up. On the desk by the screens were our phones, my wallet and Charlie’s purse. If we could get to a phone without our guard seeing, maybe we could call the authorities and get the police here.

I thought I saw some movement on one of the screens. I looked harder but couldn’t see anything. It must have been my eyes playing tricks on me, nothing more than wishful thinking. Then there was more movement—it was an old woman pushing a shopping cart full of what looked like cardboard and cans.

“She is always here,” the man said. “Maybe she will break in and rescue you.” He laughed. “You might as well go to sleep.”