Next the girls discovered a spiral staircase that wound up and up and up, and they climbed to the top of a tower. There they turned on a light, saw a man at a table sitting in a chair and looking out one of the open windows into the dark. He had a radio next to him, and he had a big gun in front of him. He’d yelled at the girls in that ugly foreign language, and Kate laughed and ran back down the stairs. Claire followed her sister, but her heart pounded in her chest. The man had barked into his radio, and soon men came and got the girls and took them by their arms to their parents’ room. In English one of the big men told Daddy to put his girls to bed, and Daddy had yelled back at the man, told him to keep his hands off, and then stormed out on the balcony while Mummy brought Kate and Claire into the bathroom to drink the medicine.
It had been an awful day and an awful night, and now that Claire had awakened, she knew it had been no bad dream, and today would likely be just as horrid.
As Claire sat at the edge of her bed in the low light and worried, she thought she heard a funny noise in the distance. Soon it was louder, came closer to the château. The skies above her home in London were filled with helicopters, so it didn’t take her long to identify the distinctive sound of a propeller.
She stood with her face to the window. The helicopter came over the woods on the far side of the big fountain in the big back garden. Its black rotors spun above its white body as it approached the far edge of the gravel car park, then it turned to the side, landed on its wheels, and sank down. The door on the side opened, and four men in suits climbed out.
The whipping wind of the helicopter blew open one man’s suit coat, and even from sixty meters Claire could see the pistol holster against the man’s white shirt.
More men with guns.
As the blades whipped above them, four more men stepped out of the chopper. The first man was black and wore a brown suit. The next man hauled two suitcases. He had a long ponytail and ran forward towards the château. Then came a man carrying a briefcase. He was thin and wore a black suit with a raincoat over it. His shiny black hair was short and messy in the wind, and Claire could tell, even in the distance, that he was someone important. The way he looked about, stormed forward on the balls of his feet, and gestured to those around him.
The next man who exited the helicopter was larger, older, bald except long white hair around his ears that lashed around below the spinning propellers. Claire pressed her face to the glass, squinted to get a better look.
Then she shouted out loud, waking Kate behind her with a start, though she’d somehow managed to sleep through the helicopter’s approach and landing.
“Grandpa!”
—
Fitzroy was allowed a minute with his son and daughter-in-law in the kitchen on the ground floor of the château. Phillip and Elise were subdued and confused and a little too scared to be angry.
From there he was shuffled up to the third floor to a large room that was set up similar to the conference room at the LaurentGroup subsidiary in London. There was a seat for him, a big Louis XV armchair. Lloyd had his own chair, a sleek, black, modern model. The Tech was already on station, setting up equipment on a long bank of tables that had been hauled in from other rooms and pushed together to suit his needs. He was just now flipping switches on laptops and radio sets, bringing the new operations center online.
The room had three doors leading from it. One was to an adjoining bathroom, the second was to the main hall, and the third, Fitzroy noted when one of the Belarusian guard force came through it to speak privately with Lloyd, was the entrance to a small spiral staircase that surely went both up towards the tower above them and continued down to the lower floors.
The new arrivals from London were still just settling in when Sir Donald’s phone vibrated on the table next to his chair. A wire ran from it to a speaker box on the table. As Lloyd pushed the button to answer, the Tech shouted to the room that he was not yet ready to trace the call.
“Cheltenham Security,” said Sir Donald. His voice was tiring, scratched.
“It’s me,” said the Gray Man.
“How are you, lad?”
There was a long pause. Finally, “You told them about Guarda.”
Fitzroy did not deny it. He said softly, wearily. “Yes, I did. I am truly sorry.”
“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be when your family dies. Good-bye and good luck, Don.”
Lloyd stood in the middle of the room. Quickly he walked to the table, leaned over the phone, and spoke. “Good morning, Courtland.”
There was no reply on the line for so long that Lloyd picked up the little phone and looked at it to see if the call was still open.
“Who the hell is this?”
“Court, you may not want to be so hard on the good knight here. I am afraid I put him in an utterly untenable position.”
“Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
“No.”
“We used to work together. It’s Lloyd.”
There was nothing.
