The Trip

O’Hare Airport / Airborne — Atlantic Chicago to London — October 1969

The next evening they loaded the Lincoln Continental and drove for O’Hare. Derek at the wheel. Lodin behind tinted glass. Roarke rode shotgun watching the mirrors the way he’d been watching mirrors since before the Model T.

He saw the tail fifteen minutes in. Dark sedan, two cars back, professional spacing. It had been there since Lake Shore Drive. When traffic compressed at the Circle interchange and every other car bunched together, the sedan held its gap. Wrong behavior. Natasha saw it too. Derek saw it when they told him.

Roarke knew the surface streets around Kostner and Fifth Avenue the way he knew the bones of his own hands. Sixty-one years of running errands through blocks that had been unpaved when he started. Derek took the exit fast, cut through an alley behind a meatpacking plant, came out on Pulaski heading north. The sedan tried to follow. Made one turn. Missed the second. Mirrors clean in two minutes.

Lodin’s voice from behind the glass: problem? Handled.

At O’Hare, Derek found the bomb during pre-flight. Under the starboard wing, near the landing gear. Wires, a box, a battery pack. Crude. Almost carelessly placed. Natasha slid under the fuselage and came out carrying the device like a dead animal. Corroded firing mechanism. Defective. It wouldn’t have detonated.

It wasn’t hidden, she said. It was placed where any competent inspection would find it.

Lodin interrogated the two airport workers with Dominate. Found nothing in their heads. Wiped them clean. His face said what it said: someone knew about the trip. Someone who wanted them to know they knew.

They flew anyway. Over the Atlantic in a Learjet, engines droning, the dark water thirty thousand feet below. An hour in, Lodin stood in the cabin and laid out the briefing materials. A map of London. Hotel documents. Twenty-two thousand dollars in cash. An auction pamphlet he didn’t explain. He tapped it once and said he would not be outbid.

Then he took Roarke’s wrist and opened a vein in his own. Two mouthfuls of blood that tasted like cold metal and then burned like a furnace door. The cabin sharpened – Derek’s heartbeat through the bulkhead, JP-4 in the fuel lines, every rivet vibrating independently. Dominate sat in Roarke’s mind like a weapon he hadn’t asked for.

In case there is trouble during the day, Lodin said.

He gave them a phone number for the Queen of London’s people. Request feeding permission. Speak respectfully.

Then he climbed into his crate at thirty thousand feet and pulled the lid shut. The latches clicked from inside. Roarke sat in the dark with borrowed power in his blood and the Atlantic beneath him, going to a city he’d never seen for reasons he hadn’t been told, because a man he loved and hated and couldn’t tell the difference had said the word London like it meant something that mattered.

The others slept. Roarke stared at the dark window and strummed his fingers against the armrest and thought about half a million people with candles who got to choose what to fight for.