Alex’s arm shot forward, palm up. He hooked his fingers deep into the American’s flared nostrils and pulled him forward. He didn’t hit at Buckner’s face. He hit through and beyond it and it crushed the nose flat against the bones and all but snapped Buckner’s head off his neck and then Alex was hammering Buckner’s mouth bloody with his fists until Buckner fell down and rolled away and came up with a revolver in his fist; but the blood was in Buckner’s eyes, he couldn’t see his opponent and Alex jumped him. The two men wrestled for the gun and she heard it when Alex broke the American’s finger in the trigger guard. Then the revolver came spinning away because Alex had no use for it-a gun was the wrong thing now; it had to be flesh on flesh for this. There was no damming the flood of it. When Buckner tried to get up Alex grasped the back of his head and hammered it down into the tarmac. Then he locked his fists together and she heard his inhuman roar when he struck the American at the base of the neck.
Alex stood up and waited for him to rise. Buckner came out of his wreckage crawling mindlessly, dragging himself in a blind circle, breathing in broken gasps, spitting teeth.
A throbbing vein stood out in Alex’s forehead. He braced himself to kick Buckner’s face.
John Spaight grasped him from behind-pinned his arms, locked a grip around Alex’s chest. “Stop it, Alex. It’s enough.”
The bullet slammed into Buckner with an awful deliberate precision of aim: dead center between the eyes.
She turned and saw Prince Leon drop the gun back to the frozen ground from which he’d picked it up.
15
She heard Spaight talking softly-it was Pappy Johnson he was talking to. Pappy was out of breath from his run. “Wrap him up,” Spaight said, “and put him with the Baron.”
She felt herself sag and suddenly Alex was there, holding her. She half-heard Spaight:
“He had to keep it secret from the rest of us-his own twisted reasons but they make a horrible kind of sense. If you people had known it was the Americans who’d blown you, you’d have told the world.”
Alex turned; he almost lost his balance. “Were you in on this, John?”
“No. For God’s sake-what do you think of me?”
“He’s telling the truth,” she said.
Alex dipped his head groggily. “Buckner must have had Vassily killed. I guess he wanted to work with an Americanized Russian-someone he thought he could control. Me. Then he had somebody shoot at me in Boston-shoot to miss. That was to throw suspicion off but the next one wasn’t. The one in Scotland. That was to scare me, make me think my life was in danger-he thought I’d tell him the plan then.” He looked at Spaight then. “There’s something worse than any of that. We don’t know if it was his own initiative-or if he had orders to do it the way he did it.”
Spaight’s face went wide and then crumpled when the impact reached him. “Sweet sweet Jesus.”
Under the thin noon sun she watched the airplanes lift off into the cold sky. The guns murmured on the Russian front. She felt the pressure of Alex’s hands on her shoulders. They stood utterly alone on the runway. She leaned back against him and let him take her weight.
“What are we going to do?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
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The Romanov succession Page 32