Читать книгу Mercy - David Kessler - Страница 7

Inside the blue Lincoln, the small man was sitting tensely. He knew that waiting was an inherently tense activity. Inactivity breeds a kind of stress that the most vigorous of purposeful action can never match. But there was nothing he could do about it. Waiting was part of the job.

The car was parked and the engine was off. But the key remained in the ignition, as if inactivity might give way to dynamism at any moment.

He touched the Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear, nervously. There was nothing particularly conspicuous about him. No one would pay attention to a twenty-seven-year-old, blue-eyed, brown-haired man in a dark blue suit nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Midway Café a few yards ahead. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t wearing a suit: his jacket was off, his blue tie loosened and the collar button of the white shirt opened.

From his attire and demeanor, he could almost have been an off-duty G-man. But his modest height and slight build detracted from that, giving him an innocuous aura. If he had been a Washington spook, he would have been a pen-pushing bean-counter, not a field agent. There was no way anyone could have felt threatened or intimidated by him, even though his close-cropped hair hinted—misleadingly—at a military background.

Poised well above the horizon, the sun’s warm glow was filtered by a thin veil of cloud. To the man in the car it had all the appearance of a giant wound in the sky, with blood still oozing through the bandage—not a new wound, more like an old one that refuses to heal.

He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder and took a single sip. Then he put the cup back down and looked round. Golden Gate Avenue looked normal, neither calm nor exceptionally busy. There was no sense of anything important going on twenty yards from where he sat.

He stared at the lacquered, grainy wood of the dashboard, admiring its elegance. It was a trivial thought—but it helped to stave off the boredom…for a couple of minutes at least.

The day was warm—not hot, just warm—hence his decision to take the jacket off. He tended to sweat in any sort of cumbersome clothing.

Finally the Bluetooth earpiece crackled to life.

‘You know Mrs Olsen, I presume.’

‘We’ve seen each other briefly,’ Alex’s embarrassed voice came through the earpiece. ‘But we’ve never actually been introduced.’