There was no way he could reach up and wrestle the gun from her before she put a bullet in him, and there was no way he could wriggle out from under her either. Ronan closed his eyes. He pictured her in his mind’s eye, focusing on her broken wrist. He had one chance. He had to make it count.
He bowed his head, as though in prayer or hiding. It didn’t matter which she thought it was, only that she thought it was surrender.
He let his body go limp, accepting the inevitability of the bullet.
He felt the rhythm of her breathing change. She was mastering whatever last shred of doubt that prevented her from pulling the trigger. It was now or never.
Ronan Frost drove his head straight up.
The gun slipped off the side of his head and she fired into the floor. As the recoil jerked her back Ronan gambled his life on the fact that the surprise would leave her broken wrist unprotected. He grabbed it and yanked down on it mercilessly. She squeezed off a second shot in agony. It went into the wall. He forced her hand back impossibly, the broken bones tearing through the skin. It wouldn’t take a lot for one of the jagged edges to tear through a vein, he knew. That was the difference between them-he had killed before.
he tried to aim the Browning at him, but Ronan slammed his free arm up against hers, sending the gun spinning out of her hand. It discharged again as it hit the floor, the bullet burying itself in the wall beside his head. Ronan threw all of his weight forward, trying to unbalance the woman. She went scrambling backwards, cradling her broken wrist.
He went for the gun.
She ran for the door.
Ronan scrambled across the floor, grabbed the Browning, and rolled half onto his back. He didn’t aim, just pulled the trigger. The shot went high and wide, digging out one of the ceiling’s Artex swirls. He hadn’t expected it to hit.
The woman caught one of the standing hairdryers and, wielding it like a lance, charged at the plate glass window. It shattered around the ceramic bulb of the dryer’s head. The woman didn’t hesitate; she threw herself head-first out through the window even as the glass shattered into jagged teeth and came snapping down. She hit the street on her right knee and shoulder, rolling through the broken glass and coming up on her feet, torn and bloodied. She cast a single backward glance his way, then took off across the road, sprinting toward the press of people coming out of the subway station.
Walking through the broken glass, Ronan asked Lethe, “You got a visual on her?”
“Of course I have,” Lethe said, as though talking to a technologically retarded child. “Hang on, are you telling me a girl just beat you up?”
“Less of the chat. Just tell me where she is.”
Ronan ducked through what was left of the window. People were staring at him as he emerged onto the street. He could feel the blanket of shock that was settling over them. This was sleepy suburbia. Gunmen didn’t run out into the street. They melted away from him as he set off after the woman. He could feel their fear.
“Police,” he shouted, even though it was a lie. That one word reestablished their natural world order.
Ronan ran hard, keeping his body low, arms and legs pumping furiously as he drove himself on. He could see the woman. She had maybe forty yards on him. She had pulled the balaclava off and was running with it clutched in her right hand. She was running flat out, dodging every few steps between commuters on their way to work.
He did the math: The Browning had an effective range of fifty yards; there were a hundred other people in the street, bystanders; she was a moving target, but it was a straight shot. He could almost certainly take her down with a single, well-placed shot-all he had to do was steady himself before he took it. But that meant shooting an unarmed woman in the back. With so many people in the street there was nothing to say someone wouldn’t take a step or two the wrong way, distracted by something in a shop window or one of the newspaper headlines on the newsstand, and cross the bullet’s path. It was all too easy for someone to wind up getting hit by accident in a crowded street. The woman knew that; that was why she was running toward the thickest concentration of people. Like the old saying went, there was safety in numbers-it was just a different kind of safety.
Ronan had five seconds to take the shot if he was going to take it. After that she was going to disappear into the subway system, Lethe would lose his visual contact and Ronan would be left chasing shadows.
The crowd opened up to swallow the woman and she was gone. He cursed.
“Tell me you can see her!” he shouted into the earpiece.
t c3" face="Helvetica" color="black"›“Sorry boss.”
“Bollocks!” Frost cursed again. He pushed his way between the people, but it was impossible not to be slowed down by them. On one side of the station’s entrance flowers spilled into the street, on the other, newspapers. He ran inside and hurdled the ticket barrier. There was only one way she could have gone-down to the platform. Breathing hard Ronan took three and four steps at a time. He tried to see over the heads of the commuters, but one dark, long-haired woman looked very much like another dark, long-haired woman. She was cool. She wasn’t pushing her way through the press of people, she was going with it, which made her all the more difficult to spot.
The PA system announced the impending arrival of the next southbound train in its tinny voice. He felt the ground beneath his feet begin to tremble as the subway rumbled in to the station.
He couldn’t let her get onto it, not if he wanted to find out who the hell she was working for. He squeezed between a pin-striped suit and a mohair jacket. The air was thick with perfume, cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. A busker stood in the corner where the tunnel bent around to go beneath the tracks. His riff echoed off the yellow tiles. Ronan thought about shouting “Police!” again, but people were just as likely to close ranks to make sure he didn’t catch the woman as they were to let him through.
She had to be hurting. The adrenalin would only take away so much of the pain. A broken wrist was a broken wrist. When her body came down from it she’d be in agony. Every bump and jostle against another commuter had to be sending another lancing pain through every nerve and fiber in her body-unless she’s loaded up on methamphetamines, he thought. It made sense. She hadn’t so much as flinched when he shattered her wrist. The thought didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. He’d come up against meth-heads in combat before-it was like trying to take down the bloody Terminator.
Ronan pushed passed a couple of school girls in their jailbait uniforms of short, checkered skirts and too-tight blouses.
And then he saw her.
She was halfway down the platform, weaving her way toward the dark mouth of the tunnel at the far end. He pushed past another suit, his eyes firmly fixed on the woman’s back. The train’s headlights shone brightly, illuminating the entire platform. He felt the displaced wind hit his face as the train slowed to a stop. The doors came open. She made no attempt to board the train, she just walked on toward the end of the platform. She looked over her shoulder, and Ronan saw her face for the first time.
She didn’t ha that crazed look of someone stoned out of her mind. She looked-and he couldn’t believe he was thinking it-beautiful. Heart-stoppingly so. She had that half-cast of the Middle Eastern territories and very sharp, very precise features. It bought her a few precious seconds while he tried to reconcile the beating he’d taken with the delicate beauty of the woman before him. She saw him and started to run.
She reached the end of the platform as the train started to pull out. She didn’t slow down. She jumped down onto the tracks and ran into the all-enveloping darkness of the tunnel.
He pulled the Browning and dropped to one knee, braced to fire into the mouth of the tunnel. He squeezed off a shot. The report was deafening in the confines of the tunnel, amplified by the weird acoustics. There was no accompanying grunt from the darkness. He walked toward the end of the platform.
He could hear her stumbling footsteps as she ran blindly away from him.
Those same acoustics that had turned his Browning into a roaring cannon carried the scuff and scrape of her feet on the chips of stone back to him with surprising clarity. Each sound seemed so close he ought to have been able to reach out his hand and touch her.
Ronan stared after her into the black hole.
The sign said four minutes until the next train was due.
The ground beneath his feet shivered as another train rolled into the neighboring platform, scaring a rat out of its hiding place. The sleek-bodied rodent scurried across his feet and disappeared between the cracks in the wall. Ronan watched it go and lashed out at the wall in frustration. He really didn’t want to go haring off into a subway tunnel in the middle of the morning rush hour. He could think of a dozen less painful ways to commit suicide.
Still holding the Browning, he dropped down off the platform. The tunnel was unlit, so twenty feet in it became a solid wall of black. He made sure he was in the middle of the rails and set off after her. Behind him a voice came over the PA system, telling them to get off the tracks. He ignored it.
Ronan followed the woman into the tunnel and prayed to whatever god looked after Irish idiots playing on railway lines that the next train was cancelled.
A dozen paces in the darkness became absolute. He stopped dead still, trying to hear her in front of him. He couldn’t. The darkness was filled with the sound of his own heavy breathing. “Don’t do this,” he called out, still not moving. He heard something then, a soft skittering in response to his voice: more ras. “There’s nowhere to run, and in a couple of minutes the next train’s going to make this tunnel pretty bloody uncomfortable for both of us. Come on, don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.”
He waited. Nothing.
She wasn’t coming out. He tried to think. He was really beginning to wish he’d taken the shot when he’d had the chance. She was a professional, which meant, more likely than not, she wouldn’t be carrying anything that identified her or tied her in with whoever had hired her to give Fisher’s place a going over. But even professionals made mistakes. He’d taken her by surprise. She’d run before she could find whatever it was she’d gone there looking for-which meant it was still back there waiting to be found.
He chewed on his top lip, took a deep breath.
Ronan started to walk forward. He felt out each step carefully, scuffing his toe along the rough stones until he found the safety of the next wooden tie. One step at a time he edged his way deeper into the tunnel. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure the light wasn’t too far away for him to make it back when the skin along his forearms prickled. The air around him stirred ever so slightly.
And then he felt it: the telltale tremor of the train shivering through the tracks. A moment later light swept around the corner. He saw her caught in the train’s headlights. She was no more than twenty feet in front of him, looking around frantically until she saw whatever it was she was looking for, and started to run toward the oncoming train.
Ronan knew then he wasn’t going to need to take the shot. The train would do his dirty work for him-but there would be nothing left but blood and guts on the tracks for him to pick over, and only then if he managed to get out of the tunnel himself before the train sheered his body in two. He screamed at the woman. There were no words, just this raw explosion of sound from his mouth.
Inside his cabin, the driver leaned on the horn. In the tunnel the collision of sounds was deafening: the screech of the brakes, the shriek of steel sliding on iron as the wheels locked and slid, the blare of the horn as the driver hit it over and over again, the maddening bark of the loudspeaker ordering them off the tracks, and Ronan Frost’s screams as he watched the woman running hell for leather straight at the front of the train.
And then she disappeared.
Just like that.
One minute she was there, and the next she wasn’t.
But there was no bloody detonation of flesh. No impact. No spray of blood across the headlights. No body strewn in pieces across the tracks.
The sight kept him rooted to the spot a second too long.
He felt the next breath die in his throat.
Ronan realized he didn’t have time to run. There was no way he’d make it out of the tunnel and back up onto the platform before the train slammed into his back. He knew what she’d done; she’d run for one of the service stairways.
He looked left and right. The entire tunnel lit up like midday by the onrushing headlights. He couldn’t see anywhere to hide. So much for that god, the thought flashed across his mind. Of all the “last things” he had expected to flood his final moments-beautiful women loved and lost, friends betrayed, lives taken and saved-cursing a make-believe deity hadn’t so much as registered as a possible farewell-to-the-flesh thought.
He thought about throwing himself down and lying flat on his stomach between the tracks and praying there wasn’t a trailing hook dangling from the train’s under-carriage to gut him like a fish and drag him all the way back to the city center.
The headlights were huge now, filling the tunnel. The tunnel itself wasn’t wide enough for him to press himself up against the wall. He looked down at the wheels, then at the tracks and at the curve of the wall, and realized it was his only chance. The horn blared again. Despite the shriek of the breaks the train wasn’t slowing anywhere near quickly enough to save his life. He had seconds to think.
Move.
One chance.
It all came down to the width of the tracks and the aerodynamics of the train itself. All he could do was pray there was an inch to spare.
Ronan Frost hurled himself sideways, hitting the ground hard, and wedged himself into the narrow gap between the iron rail and the concrete wall. He rolled over onto his right shoulder, face pressed right up against the cold concrete. He tried to stop breathing and meltt a trhe wall, making himself as thin as possible. The horn screeched in his ears, so close it could have been inside his head. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to flinch. The wind battered him up against the wall. Suddenly an incredible force tried to peel his head up into the train’s path.
Ronan gritted his teeth and pressed his face into the gravel. The vacuum caused by the displaced air and the train’s momentum tore at his hair. His screams were lost beneath the madness of the hellbound train. An agonized sob tore between his teeth. He resisted every impulse to throw his head back to relieve the pain, knowing that it all that was saving his life.
The duh-duh-de-duh duh-duh-de-duh of the wheels filled his head.
He couldn’t breathe.
The wind displaced by the train pummeled the Irishman up against the concrete wall, and he loved every damned second of that pain because it meant he was alive.
And then it was gone. The train had passed him, and he could breathe again. He lay there for a full thirty seconds, listening to the mad rise and fall of his own breathing, then pushed himself to his feet. He thought about going deeper into the tunnel, chasing the woman up the service stairwell to the surface, but she’d be long gone by the time he reached the top. Still, there was no way she could know he’d survived. In her place he would go back to the apartment to finish what he’d started. He had to assume she’d think like him.
Ronan Frost walked unsteadily toward the light.
He felt a warm, wet stickiness on his cheek and reached up to feel out the damage. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. There was more blood than he would have expected. The gravel had cut up the side of his face.
As he came out of the tunnel, the first of the next wave of commuters had begun to file onto the platform. A few of them looked at him curiously; the others adopted the Ostrich’s if-I-don’t-see-it-it-doesn’t-see-me attitude, deliberately not looking his way. That was what the city had become over the last few years. A decade ago a good Samaritan would have come to the end of the platform to help him up while someone else went for help. Today they watched him suspiciously as he climbed unsteadily back to the
platform and walked toward them. He couldn’t blame them. He knew what he must have looked like, battered and bloody and, he realized, still holding the Browning in his right hand.
Ronan holstered the gun.
Walking back toward the entrance he hit the speed dial on the earpiece, but he’d lost the network down in the tunnel. He pushed his way through the barriers, ignoring the stares, and hit the speed dial again and again until Lethe answered: “Talk to me.”
“Lost her in the tunnels and nearly got myself flattened by the 8:30 to South Shields. All in all not the best result.”
“Oh, I’d say the nearly part was a home win. So, fill me in?”
“Female. Middle Eastern origin. Lebanese, if I was forced to guess-she had that look. Five eight with a punch like Tyson. Beautiful. And by that I don’t mean the kind of girl you want to take home to meet your mother; we’re talking life as a willing sex slave.”
“I’ll run her against Six’s active database. If she’s running out of the Middle East, odds are Intelligence has got something on her,” Lethe said in his ear. “Maybe they’ve got a ‘hot assassin’ search string set up.”
“She used one of the emergency service stairwells on the southbound rail, maybe fifty yards inside the tunnel. Can you pull up the schematics and see where she’ll have come out?” Ronan asked, ignoring him.
“Already on it, Frosty. Looking for live stream CCTV in the vicinity right now. If she came out that way, I’ll find her, have no fear.”
Ronan walked back toward the apartment on Acorn Road. As he had expected, the police had begun to gather outside the broken window of the hairdressing salon. He had to get back inside Fisher’s place, but he could hardly walk up to the front door looking the way he did; and the back alley was already crawling with cops.
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