Free The Keepers of the Library by Glenn Cooper Page B

earplugs. Gone was the rumble of diesel and petrol engines and their stinky chemical haze. All the buses and cars were electric or the newer fuel-cell models and street noises were reduced to the soft whine of drive trains and the whir of rubber on asphalt. Back home, especially in the smaller towns and cities like Panama City, there were still some holdouts spending twenty bucks a gallon for the privilege of being petroleum throwbacks, butthese were dinosaurs like himself who couldn’t give up their youths. His own toy was a 1969 Firebird, a beautifully restored machine he’d bought for himself in 2012 with some of the advance money from his book. It got six miles per gallon—a very expensive baby to run but worth every penny when he gunned it at a light change.
    Will passed through the massive arched entry into Thames House where he presented himself to reception. He figured he wouldn’t be getting priority treatment, and forty minutes later, his suspicions were confirmed when he was still waiting. Finally, a young woman came down to fetch him. He initially thought she was a PA—partly because of her youth and partly because her skirt seemed too tight to be an agent’s. In his experience, albeit outdated, operatives usually didn’t try to draw attention to their asses. But he was wrong.
    “Is this Mr. Piper?” she asked him. “I’m Annie Locke, the case officer assigned to assist you.”
    She had short blond hair, intensely blue eyes and very white skin.
    Another pretty thirtysomething with good legs, he thought, disdainfully. Just what I don’t need right now.
    “Call me Will,” he said.
    “Right, Will, hope you had a good flight over. Let’s go back to my office, shall we?”
    “You lead, I’ll follow,” he said, positioning himself to take in her swaying rear.
    Her office on the fifth floor was tiny and it said everything he needed to know about her rank. Without Nancy’s connections, he wouldn’t be here at all, but this was clearly a lip-service assignment with no horsepower behind it.
    “How long’ve you been with the Security Service?” he asked.
    “Five years now,” she said, sitting at her desk and offering him a chair.
    “And before that?”
    “University,” she said.
    Jesus, not even thirty, he thought. “I see.”
    “So,” she said. “Your son. Any new developments since last night?”
    He shook his head. “I called my wife from the car. There’s nothing.”
    “And nothing other than timing to suggest that his sojourn to Britain has anything to do with the Chinese Doomsday case.”
    “No.”
    “I’m sure you understand, Will, that the upstairs boys agreed to devote resources to the case only based upon the slimmest of chances that there might be a connection.”
    “I understand that, Annie.” He didn’t ask for permission to use her first name. “I also understand that this is being done as an interagency courtesy.”
    “Quite so.”
    “Well, I appreciate it. And I’m grateful. I hope I’m not pulling you off something you consider more important.”
    She gave a voice command and Phillip’s face appeared on her wall screen. “Let’s just find your son, shall we?”
    She was efficient, he’d give her that. She had all the relevant intel at her fingertips and on her screen. CCTV image captures at Heathrow, the underground, King’s Cross station. And her presentation was crisp. In some ways she reminded him of a young Special Agent Nancy Lipinski back when she was thrust uponhim on the Doomsday case. But Annie Locke was less earnest, less eager, and she possessed a dash of cynicism, a quality which had always been dear to him.
    He watched the screen grabs of Phillip with a certain pride. The boy was clearly on his own. Someone might well have been tailing him, but no one was guiding him. He was out there, maneuvering a foreign city alone. The few shots that captured his face suggested to Will a trace of anxiety tempered with a determination to accomplish his