The girl was named Fiona. She was just about to turn five years old and had fallen off a swing at her day-care center. The wood chips there had scratched her skin, but it was also feared that she might have broken the radius in her left forearm. Sandy Clark held the arm while the child cried. Very slowly and carefully, she manipulated it, and the intensity of the child’s tears didn’t change. This wasn’t broken . . . well, possibly a very minor green-stick fracture, but probably not even that.
“Let’s get an X ray,” Patsy said, handing over a grape sucker to the kid. It worked as well in England as it did in America. The tears stopped as she used her good right arm and teeth to rip off the plastic, then stuck the thing into her cute little mouth. Sandy used wetted gauze to clean off the arm. No need for stitches, just a few nasty scrapes that she’d paint with antiseptic and cover with two large Band-Aids.
This ER wasn’t as busy as its American counterparts. For one thing, it was in the country, and there was less opportunity for a major injury-they’d had a farmer the previous week who’d come close to ripping his arm off with a farm implement, but Sandy and Patsy had been off-duty then. There were fewer severe auto accidents than in a comparable American area, because the Brits, despite their narrow roads and looser speed limits, seemed to drive more safely than Americans, a fact that had both of the American medics scratching their heads. All in all, duty here was fairly civilized. The hospital was overstaffed by American standards, and that made everyone’s workload on the easy side of reasonable, somewhat to the surprise of both Americans. Ten minutes later, Patsy looked over the X ray and saw that the bones of Fiona’s forearm were just fine. Thirty minutes after that, she was on her way back to day care, where it was time for lunch. Patsy sat down at her desk and went back to reading the latest issue of The Lancet, while her mother returned to her stand-up desk and chatted with a colleague. Both perversely wished for more work to do, though that meant pain for someone they didn’t know. Sandy Clark remarked to her English friend that she hadn’t seen a gunshot wound in her whole time in England. In her Williamsburg, Virginia, hospital they’d been almost a daily occurrence, a fact that somewhat horrified her colleagues but was just part of the landscape for an American ER nurse.
Hereford wasn’t exactly a sleepy community, but the vehicular traffic didn’t make it a bustling metropolis either. Grady was in his rented car, following the trucks to the objective, and going more slowly than usual, here in the far-left lane, because he’d anticipated thicker traffic and therefore a longer trip in terms of time. He could have moved off at a faster clip, and therefore started the mission earlier, but he was a methodical sort, and once his plan was drafted, he tended to stick to it almost slavishly. That way, everyone knew what had to happen and when, which made operational sense. For the unexpected, every team member carried a cellular phone with speeddial settings for every other member. Sean figured they were almost as good as the tactical radios the soldiers carried.
There was the hospital. It sat at the bottom of a shallow slope. The parking lot didn’t seem to be very crowded. Maybe there weren’t many patients in their beds, or maybe the visitors were off having lunch before coming back to see their loved ones.
Dmitriy pulled his rental car over to the side of the through-road and stopped. He was half a kilometer or so from the hospital, and from the top of this hill, he could see two sides, the front and the side entrance for the hospital’s emergency room. He switched the motor off after lowering the power windows and waited to see what would happen next. On the backseat he had an inexpensive set of 7×35 binoculars purchased at an airport shop, and he decided to get them out. Next to him on the seat was his cellular phone, should he need it. He saw three heavy trucks pull up and stop close to the hospital in positions far nearer than his, but, like his spot, able to cover the front and the emergency side entrance.
It was then that Popov had a random thought. Why not call that Clark fellow at Hereford and warn him of what was to happen? He, Popov, didn’t want these people to survive the afternoon, did he? If they didn’t, then he’d have that five-million plus American dollars, and then he could disappear from the face of the earth. The islands of the Caribbean appealed to him; he’d gone over some travel brochures. They’d have some British amenities-honest police, pubs, cordial people-plus a quiet, unhurried life, Net were close enough to America that he could travel there to manage his funds in whatever investment scheme lie opted for . . .
But . . . no. There was the off chance that Grady would get away from this one, and he didn’t want to risk being hunted by that intense and vicious Irishman. No, it was better that he let this play out without his interference, and so he sat in the car, binoculars in his lap, listening to classical music on one of the regular BBC radio stations.
Grady got out of his Jaguar. He opened the boot, withdrew his parcel, and pocketed the keys. Timothy O’Neil dismounted his vehicle – he’d chosen a small van – and stood still, waiting for the other five men to join him. This they did after a few minutes. Timmy lifted his cell phone it and thumbed the number-one speeddial setting. A hundred yards away, Grady’s phone started chirping.
“Yes?”
“We are ready here, Sean.”
“Go on, then. We’re ready here as well. Good luck, lad.”
“Very well, we are moving in now.”
O’Neil was wearing the brown coveralls of a package deliveryman. He walked toward the hospital’s side entrance carrying a large cardboard box, followed by four other men in civilian clothes carrying boxes similar in size, but not in color.
Popov looked into his rearview mirror in annoyance. A police car was pulling over to the side of the road, and a few seconds later, a constable got out and walked to his car.
“Having a problem, sir?” the cop asked.
“Oh, no, not really-that is, I called the rental company, and they’re sending someone out, you see.”
“What went wrong?” the policeman asked.
“Not sure. The motor started running badly, and I thought it a good idea to pull over and shut it off. Anyway,” the Russian repeated, “I called into the company, and they’re sending someone to sort it out.”
“Ah, very good, then.” The police constable stretched, and it seemed as though he’d pulled over as much to get some fresh air as to render assistance to a stranded motorist. The timing, Popov thought, could have been better.
“Can I help you?” the desk clerk said.
“I have a delivery for Dr. Chavez, and Nurse”-he looked down at the slip of paper on the box, which seemed to him a clever bit of acting-“Clark. Are they in this afternoon?” Timmy O’Neil asked.
“I’ll fetch them,” the clerk said helpfully, heading back into the work area.
The IRA soldier’s hand slid along the inside of the lid, ready to flip the box open. He turned and nodded to the other four, who waited politely in line behind him. O’Neil thumbed his nose, and one of them-his name was Jimmy Carr-walked back outside. There was a police car there, a Range Rover, white with an orange stripe down the side. The policeman inside was eating a sandwich, taking lunch at a convenient place, in what American cops sometimes called “cooping,” just killing time when nothing was going on. He saw the man standing outside the casualty-receive entrance holding what looked like a flower box. Several others had just gone inside holding similar boxes, but this was a hospital, and people gave flowers to those inside of them . . . Even so . . . the man with the large white box was staring at his police automobile, as people often did. The cop looked back at him, mainly in curiosity, though his cop instincts were beginning to light up.
“I’m Dr. Chavez,” Patsy said. She was almost as tall as he was, O’Neil saw, and very pregnant beneath her starched white lab coat. “You have something for me?”
“Yes, doctor, I do.” Then another woman approached, and the resemblance was striking from the first moment he saw the two of them. They had to be mother and daughter . . . and that meant that it was time.
O’Neil flipped the top off the box and instantly extracted the AKMS rifle. He was looking down at it and missed the wide-eyed shock on the faces of the two women in front of him. His right hand withdrew one of the magazines and slapped it home into the weapon. Then he changed hands and let his right hand take hold of the pistol grip while his left slapped the bolt back into the battery position. The entire exercise hadn’t lasted two seconds.