A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka Page A

was known that the HUM took donations from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Islamic states, as well as from individuals and organizations inside Pakistan and Kashmir. Rayburn noted that the HUM also solicited donations via magazine advertisements and through pamphlets, videotapes, and the like. The extent of the group’s holdings was unknown, but since the crackdown in Pakistan in late 2001, it was assumed much of its money had been redirected into more legitimate ventures—real estate, commodities trading, and the production of consumer goods.
    Chace shut the last folder and sat back, rubbing her eyes. Her watch now read nine minutes to ten, and she realized that she was both tired and ravenous.
    “You find anything in the circulars?” she asked Poole.
    Poole looked up from his file, shook his head slowly. He was a big man, perfect for rugby or leg-breaking, and, if he was to be believed, had spent much of his youth doing both. He certainly was adept with violence, though whether that was a result of his time in the SAS or something else seated far deeper, Chace didn’t know and, in fact, labored to avoid drawing conclusions. It mattered less where the Minders were from than what they could learn, and Chace herself was living proof of that. Everything in her own upbringing and education should have led her to a good marriage and a proper job, and yet here she was.
    Still, of any Minder she had ever known, it was Poole who looked most like the thugs Whitehall and the FCO and all the rest took the Special Section to be. He wasn’t, of course; Crocker would suffer no bullies and no violence junkies, gourmet cooking notwithstanding. Chace trusted and respected Poole, all the more since he hadn’t batted an eye when Tom had left and they had all shifted desks anticlockwise, with Tara taking the first chair. Poole treated her exactly as he had treated Wallace, and Chace was grateful for that.
    “No mention of HUM, no mention of anything brewing targeted at us.” Poole pushed aside the folders on his desk and pulled open his desk drawer, rummaging about. “Unless something got dropped through the cracks, this one was a complete surprise.”
    “I’m not sure I like that very much,” Chace said.
    “Suppose it could be a good sign, at least with regard to follow-ups. You have to figure if they moved more than three men into England, someone somewhere would have noticed something.”
    “You’re putting a lot of faith in the boys at Box.”
    “I am a pillar of faith,” Poole said, smiling now, with a rubber band dangling from an index finger and a paper clip held between two others.
    “Christ, I hate this,” Lankford said abruptly. “I bloody hate this.”
    Chace canted her head toward him, curious. “All fired up, are you, Chris?”
    “If you’re asking if I want a chance to hit back for this, that’s a no-brainer, Tara. I’d give a year’s pay for a crack at these bastards.”
    “And who, exactly, would you hit, Chris? Any suggestions? Unless you’re planning on taking on the whole of the Harakat ul-Mujihadin? And that’s assuming, of course, that it
was
the HUM and not someone else.”
    Lankford’s chair groaned with dismay as he tilted back in it, looking to Poole, trying to conceal a growing frown. “You know that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about cutting off the head, not taking pieces out of the body.”
    “You’re talking about assassination.”
    He looked back to Chace, and his expression surprised her with its certainty. “Absolutely,” he said.
    Chace didn’t respond, instead glancing to Poole, who was studiously avoiding involvement in the conversation by tilting back in his chair and trying to snatch the darts embedded in the board above him with the makeshift grappling hook he’d made from the rubber band and the paper clip. She didn’t know his stories, but the action told her that Poole understood, in the same way that Lankford’s certainty made it clear that the new Minder