Rules of Vengeance

He, too, had been smuggled into the country, though the route was less circuitous than that of the stolen BMW. He had come from Calais, France, spirited across the English Cha

He had no name. He was known simply by his trade. The Mechanic.

The Mechanic circled the car, ru

The job he was entrusted with this evening fell somewhere between the two. It took him six hours to complete.

When he was finished, he surveyed the BMW with a former policeman’s eye. The vehicle appeared no different from before, which meant it neither listed to one side nor drooped on its suspension. The explosives were evenly distributed throughout the left-hand, or passenger, side of the automobile and concealed in the trunk, the rocker panels, the roof, and the engine.

The Mechanic designed his charges according to a three-tiered model. First he coated the chassis with napalm gel. Next he layered in the materiel (nails, bolts, buckshot). And last he shaped and affixed the plastic explosives.

The cement was used as a tamping agent. He placed one bag of cement on the right-hand side of the trunk. The other bag he divided into smaller packages and spread throughout the engine cavity. The cement would thus deflect the force of the blast in the desired direction.

A standard cell phone attached to a blasting cap served to detonate the device. When the cell phone received a call, it passed along an electrical charge that ignited the blasting cap. The cap in turn ignited the det cord, instantaneously setting off the plastic explosives. The entire detonation sequence would last one one-hundredth of a second.

There was one last thing he needed to do. Crawling beneath the steering wheel, he installed an antijamming device. Targets had grown as sophisticated in protecting themselves as the assailants who wanted to kill them. It was not uncommon for vehicles to carry a wireless jamming device that blocked out all incoming phone signals as a defense against roadside bombs. The black box he wired to the car’s internal battery would jam the jammer. It was a question of who was one step ahead of the other.

Finished, he hauled himself from beneath the automobile and stood up.

It was then that he saw her standing by the door. “Is it ready?” she asked.

The Mechanic wiped his hands with a chamois cloth. The woman had bottle-green eyes and wavy auburn hair. Her beauty was as unexpected as her stealth. He knew better than to ask her name.

“Don’t turn on the cell phone until you park it. They have sca

“What’s its number?”

As he read it off, the woman programmed it into her own phone.

“Why the nails and bolts?” she asked.

The Mechanic darted a glance to a corner of the garage, but he did not answer.

“Why the nails?” she repeated. She had spent a week gathering the necessary materials, and the last-minute addition of nails, buckshot, and bolts bothered her. “The blast will be more than enough to do the job.”

“To make sure the job is completed to my satisfaction,” answered a gravelly baritone. A short, stocky man rose from the recesses of the garage and walked toward the car. A filterless cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. As always, he was dressed in a gray pinstripe suit of questionable quality. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a shaped charge. The blast will be confined to the target. Any collateral damage will be minimal.”

“Hello, Papi,” said the woman.

“Hello, child.”

“Why are you here?”

“I came to wish you luck.”

“Two thousand kilometers for a pat on the back? How nice of you.”

“I thought my presence would impress upon you our commitment to the mission.”

“I’m impressed.”

Papi tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it under his heel. “Nails, eh? They bother you? It doesn’t surprise me. You always were more sensitive than you liked to admit.”

“Cautious. There’s a difference.”

Papi frowned. He did not agree. “I took a risk in bringing you back.”

“It was you who let me go.”

“It was not a matter of choice. I could no longer pay you. The system was broken. It was a financial necessity.”

“But we were family. Remind me, was I your daughter or something else?”

Papi raised a hand to her face and brushed his rough fingers over her lips. “I see your husband never taught you to shut your mouth. Americans. So weak.”

The woman turned away brusquely.

“Many people are relying on you,” Papi went on, fishing in his jacket for another cigarette.

“Especially you.”

“Especially me. I admit it. I wanted to make sure you didn’t have any last-minute misgivings.”

“Why should I?”

Papi picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. “You tell me,” he said offhandedly firing his lighter, a dented Zippo that he had owned as long as she’d known him.

“Are you forgetting Rome?” Emma Ransom untucked her T-shirt and showed off her scar. “Going back isn’t an option.”

“Just so we both know that.” The stocky man kissed Emma on both cheeks, then pressed the car keys into her hand. “Good hunting.”

12

More than twelve hours after Lord Robert Russell’s residence at 1 Park Lane had been declared a crime scene, the apartment bristled with activity. Members of the forensics squad moved through the hallways, carrying evidence bags, cameras, and site-mapping equipment. It was their job to photograph the apartment, dust for prints, and search the premises top to bottom for anything resembling a clue. The work would continue well into the next day before it was complete.

Reg Cleak was standing by the entry when Kate arrived. He offered a polite smile, but she could see that the day’s labor had tired him. The lines on his face were cut as deeply as a relief map, and his cheeks hung like saddlebags from his jaw.

“Hello, Reg,” she said, squeezing his arm. “Fighting the good fight.”

“As ever, boss.” Cleak ventured a smile. “If you’d care to follow me.”

He walked across the foyer and turned into the kitchen, holding the door for Kate. “I had the team case the joint for anything that could have served as the murder weapon. You know, something hard and heavy. They had a go at the lamps, the odd statuette, tools, kitchen utensils, to see if there was any hair or tissue. Hit someone that hard, you’re likely to take a little something with you.”

“Anything turn up?”

Cleak sighed. “Do you think I brought you in here to sample the custard pudding? Have a look.” He opened the freezer door, revealing shelves stocked with frozen meats, precooked meals, and ice cream.

“Hit him with a bag of frozen peas, did he?” asked Kate.

“You’re not far off.” Cleak kneeled to open a storage drawer at the bottom of the compartment. When he stood back up, he was holding a bottle of vodka sheathed in an ice collar. “Ever seen one of these?”