have an idea how we can get away,” Samira said a minute later, as she zipped up the boots.
“All ears.”
She led him back to Occupational Therapy. “There,” she said, pointing to a display box fixed to a wall. Inside, two dozen keys hung on nails. A sign read OT Pool Cars. Sign the log BEFORE you take a key. Return with a FULL TANK. NO exceptions.
“Crumbs, Samira! Are you suggesting we steal a car?”
“Just...borrow.” She stepped back, abruptly. “You’re right. What am I thinking? It’s a terrible idea.”
He caught her shoulders. “It’s a great idea. You’re more easily corruptible than I’d thought.”
The box was locked but he found the key in a drawer. They tidied up the nurse’s station. He took the logbook and buried it in a paper recycling bin two wards north.
Now for the staff car park. As they approached a blind corner in the corridor, Samira grabbed his arm. Footsteps. He pushed her through a door into a bathroom and drew his weapon. The footsteps passed.
“Good timing,” he said. “I’m needing to use the facilities.”
As they emerged, they nearly collided with a trio of local police, packing Glocks.
“Shit, you gave me a hell of a fright,” Jamie chided in his best Scouse, tucking his weapon into the back of his waistband and pulling his jacket over top, hoping it looked like he was adjusting his jeans after a bathroom break. He leaned slightly to make Harriet’s ID spin facedown on his chest. Hopefully they were searching for a chubby guy with black hair, from the description Mariya would have given. “Know where we’re supposed to be going for this bloody lockdown? I skived off to the pub in the last drill.”
They listened intently to the bobbies’ directions, and set off accordingly, Jamie loudly grumbling that this was the last time he was coming in on his day off. When they were clear, they doubled back and crept through corridors and tunnels to the parking building, skirting security cameras wherever possible, hunkering into their clothing when not. He might be a rat in a maze, but this was his maze.
They found the car in its allotted space. “There she is,” Jamie said. “Saint Jude’s finest piece-of-shit hatchback.”
He tipped his rucksack into the car’s boot, nudging aside a collapsed wheelchair. Samira checked the car for a GPS unit or tracker.
“You’re giving the NHS credit for a bigger budget than they have,” Jamie said.
“Can’t be too careful when you’re committing a felony.”
“It’s just a regular old crime, over here.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
Samira hid in the footwell of the rear seat, covered in her brown coat. Jamie wrapped himself up in a football scarf and the cap.
At the hospital gates, a barrier arm guarded the exit. A parking attendant leaned out of her station. “We’re on lockdown. No one in or out.”
“It’s an emergency.” Jamie went with a Welsh accent.
The woman frowned. “That’s an OT car. What even is an OT emergency?”
“You can ask me that when it’s your grandmother who can’t get off the loo because her grab rail came off in her hand.”
The attendant blinked, like she was seeing a mind picture, then shrugged and lifted the barrier.
Outside the gates, they crept into a traffic jam. Rain peppered the roof. The windows fogged up. No sign of the helicopter—it’d probably scarpered after failing to take down Jamie, before local forces could scramble to respond. This close to Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, the police wouldn’t take chances.
“What’s happening?” Samira hissed.
Jamie rubbed the windscreen. The wipers beat like a crazed metronome. “Not a lot. Who’d be a getaway car driver in London?”
“Oh my God, Jamie. We just stole a car.”
“Technically, I stole it—though you did force me into it. But don’t worry. We’ll return it clean and with a full tank.”
As they crawled onto Westminster Bridge, a familiar blond head snaked around the umbrellas bobbing along the pavement. Wisely leaving the sinking ship, ready to regroup. Jamie would have to drive right past him, but with a dozen cops in view, the goon would be keeping his head even lower than Jamie’s.
Police were waving traffic by with barely a glance. He’d bet they had no idea what they were looking for but figured it wasn’t an NHS hatchback going two miles an hour.
Jamie hung a left after Big Ben and the traffic eased up. Union Jacks sagged from the towers of Westminster and the Abbey. He had to fight the urge to drive on the right-hand side, after so many years on the Continent. When they’d passed through the main tourist area into the neoclassical stone of Millbank, he gave Samira the all clear to climb into the front seat. She slid her sunglasses back on and adjusted her wig. Not that anybody on the streets had their heads up. And the dreich day and foggy windows would mess with CCTV.
“So, Putney, right?” he said.
“You know how to get there?”
“Aye. Got an address?”
She recited it from memory. “I just hope Charlotte’s there. I had no safe way of telling her I was on my way. I don’t even know what we’re collecting. This could all be for nothing.”
“Ah, it’s been fun so far. But you’d better hold your breath—we’re passing MI5.” He jerked his head to a stately building to their right, no doubt ablaze with activity beneath its imperial facade, given the morning’s alert. “Look at it, sitting there all fat and self-important while an enemy of the American people passes right by.”
“Is this you trying to make me feel less anxious?”
“Not working?”
“Not working.”
“Stick with me. We’ll be okay.”
Right. Because nobody who stuck with him ever came unstuck?
She doesn’t need to know.
Then again, she’d had intimate experience of coming unstuck in his company. Shite, they were going to be alone in a car for maybe half an hour. She wouldn’t want to talk about what’d happened between them, would she?
As they left the spooks behind and veered back to the Thames, she swore and pulled something from her coat pocket. The goon’s phone.
“I’d forgotten about this,” she said.
“We’ll chuck it in the river. You know how Tess is about phones being traced.”
She lifted the phone to the gauzy light coming through her window and tilted it left to right, like she was looking for a way in. “Believe me, I’m the same.”
“You’ve caught her paranoid tendencies?”
“You could say we contracted them from the same source.”
“Get rid of it, Samira. The guy said something about GPS tracking.”
She squinted at it. “This won’t take a second.”
“What won’t?”
“It might be useful to find out what this guy knows, where he’s been. If they can GPS-track it, so can I.”
“How long will that take?”
“A minute or two. I’ll download a backup app and sync everything to the cloud—GPS data, phone calls, texts... I can sift through it later.”
“Just you do that. It’s