Page 26 of Nobody's Hero
‘You do?’
‘Yes. It’s irrational. To an observer it seems like the act of a crazy person. It’s why the mental health angle played so well with the British press. Whatever the Romanians’ intentions, this was, on the face of it, a staggering overreaction.’
‘But?’
‘But the woman I met ten years ago wasn’t irrational. She wasn’t crazy. She was anything but. She was logical, measured, and very much in control of her thoughts and actions. There’s a disconnect between the woman I knew then, albeit briefly, and the woman in that footage. So, when you say there was no threat, I say that’s an assumption. I say there was no threat that we couldsee.’
‘We need to find her then,’ Draper said. ‘Fast.’
‘But how?’ Bernice asked. ‘Scotland Yard had this for a week before we shut it down. They got nowhere.’
Koenig walked up to the wall monitor and tapped Jane Doe’s hand.
‘That’s how,’ he said.
Chapter 24
‘Can you zoom in on her gun?’ Koenig said.
‘I can, but it’ll lose definition,’ Bernice said. ‘I’ll get tech to clean it up later, but even they won’t get it clear enough to read a serial number.’
‘It’ll have been removed anyway,’ Draper said. ‘Filed off with a grinder or burned off with acid.’
‘I’m not interested in the serial number,’ Koenig said.
Bernice fiddled with her laptop’s trackpad and pressed a button. The gun now filled the monitor’s screen.
Koenig studied the picture, then stepped back. Satisfied.
‘This is where we start,’ he said. ‘That’s a derringer. Probably a COP .357, judging by the mess it made of their heads. You can tell by the shape of the muzzle. It’s square, not round. Bulky. And that’s because it has four barrels. Stacked in a two-by-two block, like the holes on a button. It’s an unusual weapon. I think I’ve only ever seen them in cowboy movies. Normally used to settle poker disputes. Some guy accuses another of having aces up his sleeve. Reaches into his boot, pulls out a derringer. Shoots the card cheat dead.’
‘So?’
‘The Brits banned private ownership of handguns after a mass shooting in 1997. Get caught with a handgun over here and you go to jail for ten years. They’re extremely rare, derringers even rarer. It’s a signature weapon. I’d be surprised if there are more than two or three in the whole country.’
‘I’ll do some digging,’ Bernice said. ‘See who’s selling guns in London.’
‘She won’t have bought it in London,’ Koenig said. ‘Scotland Yard has LFR capabilities. Live facial recognition. Similar system to the one in New York. They use it to keep a continuous lookout for anyone on a watch list.’
‘Where then?’
A familiar feeling washed over Koenig. Tracking people had been his thing in the SOG. He’d had a peculiar knack for it. He could get inside the heads of the people he was hunting. Think like them. Wear their shoes. And even though it felt voyeuristic, he found himself slipping inside Jane Doe’s mind. She’d wanted a weapon. Probably didn’t feel complete without one. But she was keeping a low profile in a country that hated handguns. So, it had had to be small enough to be permanently hidden. That was hugely limiting in the UK. The gangbangers didn’t want small, easily concealable weapons. They wanted big shiny things with cool names like ‘Glock’ and ‘MAC-10’. They didn’t want a boot pistol, even one as powerful as the COP .357.
That meant she hadn’t gone to the guy who sold crap from the trunk of his 2011 Nissan. She’d gone to the kind of arms dealer who imported from Continental Europe or the States. Who had a select clientele. Only sold to people he knew. Hundreds of guys like that in the States, probably only one or two in the UK.
‘I need a map and a marker pen,’ Koenig said.
Chapter 25
Bernice left the briefing room, returning two minutes later with a map of the UK. It was a pocket map, a flat sheet folded in a concertina pattern. She opened it and spread it out on the table, using embassy mugs to weigh down the sides. The table wasn’t big enough. Parts of Wales, parts of Devon and Cornwall, and all of Northern Ireland hung over the edges. Koenig didn’t care. Devon, Cornwall and Wales didn’t have major cities. You didn’t go there for a specialist handgun. And while Northern Ireland was certainly somewhere firearms were sold, Koenig doubted Jane Doe would risk buying one over there. Despite the Good Friday Agreement, Brit security services maintained a watching brief in Belfast and beyond.
‘If we discount London because of live facial recognition, there are only five cities our woman would have considered when it came to buying a black-market handgun,’ Koenig said. ‘Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield. There will be others, but you’d have to be in that life to know where. Jane Doe wasn’t.’
He flipped off the lid of a marker pen. Koenig circled the five cities, then rocked back on his heels and tried to think like a woman who’d faked her own death. Where would she have felt it was safe to live in the UK?
England was out. It had 85 per cent of the population but only half the land mass. It was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. Most people lived in London and the southeast, but almost everywhere was full. And the places that weren’t tended to be tourist traps. Northumberland and Beatrix Potter’s Lake District might look empty on paper, but the moment the sun came out, they were busier than Disneyland. He discounted Wales for similar reasons. Because of its proximity to London, it tended to fill up at weekends.
That left Scotland, and Koenig thought Scotland was perfect. It was the same size as South Carolina with the same size population. But whereas South Carolinians tended to be well spread out, most Scots lived in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Huge swathes had an Alaskan-like population density. And the Highlanders, Lowlanders and Islanders who made their homes there were fiercely independent. They kept themselves to themselves. They were self-sufficient. They hated gossip. And the single malt flowed like running water. If Koenig had to hide in the UK, he’d choose Scotland. No question.