39

The Tea Room, London

Clancy had waited in the Dublin airport for three more hours but never spotted anyone else he recognized. Not Lucan Stone, not Jason, not Salem or her British friend, no one wearing a cap with I’m the Grimalkin emblazoned across it.

His curiosity had its limits. He’d caught a flight back to London.

Did it have something to do with the Order sending him the coordinates to the Tea Room, the mythical meeting spot whose location always moved, famous for is succinct invitation—just the words Tea Room plus coordinates—and the sensitive nature of transactions it hosted?

Damn skippy.

Matter of fact, he’d carried his balls in his throat since he’d received the invitation. The Tea Room’s dealings routinely included murder. But if the Order was going to kill him, he’d prefer they be quick about it, and so he’d rented a car at Heathrow and drove to the location. Smartphones made life so much easier.

His navigation software brought him to a nondescript office in London’s Camden neighborhood.

The building’s front door was unguarded, the foyer necessarily spare. The Tea Room’s location moved daily, sometimes hourly, so the intelligence community could not trace it. That left little time for decorating.

“Back here.”

The accent was unmistakably Russian. Clancy was surprised by the serenity that suffused him as he walked toward the single open door off the foyer. He hadn’t necessarily lived a good life, but it had had its moments. He’d made peace with the reality that in this life, there are no second chances, no opportunity to make amends, not really. You couldn’t erase what you’d done, only beg clemency, and that had never been Clancy’s style. It was ungracious to ask someone else to bear the burden of your mistakes, which is what forgiveness seemed to be to him.

“Thank you for coming.”

Clancy’s eyebrows twitched, but he contained his surprise beyond that. He recognized Mikhail Lutsenko sitting behind the desk. Most would. The man had a face like a wolverine above shoulders as broad and solid as a railroad tie. He wore his bespoke suit well, but he’d worked for his wealth, clawing his way from beggar to steel magnate, today one of the richest and most feared men in the world. And here he was, alone in a gray room featuring only a desk and two chairs, not a weapon in sight.

“Thank you for having me.” Clancy took the chair opposite the desk.

Lutsenko wasted no time. “Did Linder request you retire both the president and vice president?”

Before Carl Barnaby had gone to jail, he’d been the one to give Clancy all of his assignments. Since Barnaby had been sent upstream, Clancy wasn’t sure who held the power at the Order. For all he knew, it might be Linder, and this was a test to see if Clancy was loyal. “If Linder issued me any command, it would have come during a private meeting.”

“Linder is an idiot. If you want to live, you will tell me whether he asked you to retire both or one.”

Well, that mystery was solved. “He told me to remove both of ’em.”

Lutsenko was either holding back a laugh or an appendix attack. Clancy didn’t know him well enough to say. Neither fully manifested.

“You will dismiss only one this Saturday,” Lutsenko said after he’d composed itself. “I don’t care which. The schedule hasn’t changed. It must occur between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred.”

Clancy kept his face still, but his brain was slipping like a drunk on ice. Linder had gone rogue. He wanted the president and vice president dead—of course he did; then he automatically became president—but the Order only wanted one assassinated now, just enough to destabilize, not destroy, the United States. Linder likely had planned to set up Clancy to take the fall, and why not? He’d already bungled one assassination.

Clancy discovered a short-lived respect for Linder, quickly squashed under the awareness that the Order had predicted exactly what Linder would do with the power they’d given him.

And damn if Lutsenko wasn’t reading him like a book right now with those shrewd Russian eyes, squinty and probing.

Lutsenko rested an elbow on the desk separating them. “Have you met the man?”

Clancy adjusted to the conversational tangent. “I read his file when I was with the FBI. Never met him in person. I’ve only talked to him on the phone.”

“You are not stupid.”

Smart enough to know I’m in the middle of an operation going south, anyhow. Only explanation for giving any power to Linder, now that he’s proved himself a traitor.

Lutsenko continued, reading Clancy so skillfully for the second time that Clancy wondered if he’d been hypnotized into speaking his thoughts out loud. “You suspect Linder is an idiot, and now you know he’s a useful idiot. Eagerness is not the worst sin. Understand?”

“Perfectly,” Clancy said, relieved. Linder thought he was in charge, but he was their puppet. They’d give him enough rope to hang himself.

“I still see worry on your face. You must know we have the best men for the job. Any job.”

Clancy nodded. It didn’t matter much to him. He stood, sensing the meeting was over. “Anything else?”

Lutsenko cleared his throat. “Don’t fuck this one up.”

Clancy may have walked out if not for that last comment, but it poked his stubborn streak, and Clancy found that he had a thread of integrity still running through him, though it’d grown rusty from disuse. “You have the little girl? Mercy?”

Lutsenko measured Clancy. Clancy would never know what Lutsenko saw, or why he decided to tell the truth. “Not here.”

Kidnappers of children. Well, Clancy guessed he already knew that, so he didn’t know why he’d even asked. It was too late for him to make changes or amends.

He walked toward the door, his spine prickling, bracing for the cold punch of a slug right up until he found himself standing on the sidewalk, out of Lutsenko’s range. He was surprised by his palpable relief. Guess he wanted to live more than he’d thought. He was so happy, he wasn’t bothered by all the new-age hippies on the street, gathering in front of the bright buildings and under dirty awnings in this counterculture neighborhood. He found he liked it, in fact. They reminded him of his own teens. Once he was behind the wheel of his rental, he even let himself think about Vietnam, and the day he’d been called in for a medical exam, all of eighteen years old and as green as a spring apple. They only needed to send over ten soldiers that day. Clancy was the eleventh. The recruit ahead of him, the last man who was supposed to go to war, claimed he had vertigo, which meant Clancy had to go to Vietnam after all.

Life could hang on a dime like that.