Hangman

by Daniel Cole

  The man was momentarily distracted by his indoor audience. Rouche slowly raised his gun a couple of inches, just in case an opportunity presented itself.

  “No!” yelled Johns, careful to keep Baxter between them. “Tell those people if anyone leaves, I’ll start shooting. These people have the right idea: get your phones out. It’s OK. I want you to film this. I want the world to hear Rouche make his decision.”

  Satisfied that enough cameras were about to capture his moment of triumph, Johns turned his attention back to Rouche.

  “So which is it, Rouche? Who would you like me to kill, your colleague or a completely innocent family?”

  Rouche looked anxiously at Baxter.

  She gave him nothing.

  With the barrel of the gun pressing into her chin, she couldn’t move at all, let alone create an opportunity for him to take a clean shot. He then looked over at the family, recognizing all too well the look of utter desperation on the father’s face.

  There were shouts from inside as the first armed team arrived.

  “Stop!” Rouche called back to them. “Don’t come any closer!”

  When one of the officers failed to obey the order, Johns fired a warning shot, which ricocheted off the wall close to the younger girl’s head before cracking the glass barrier that separated them from the sky. The officers inside raised their hands and remained with the watching crowd.

  In the quiet that followed, Rouche could hear the little girl’s teeth chattering. She was only five or six, freezing to death while Johns protracted the ordeal under a pretense of hope.

  There was no choice to be made. This was no game. He intended to kill them all, and Baxter knew it too.

  After all the theater, all the media-seducing horrors increasing in spectacle and ambition, there was still one simple, despicable act left in their arsenal, something worse than all the mutilated bodies put together—the public execution of an innocent child. They had already proven capable of it, having murdered the entire Bantham family behind closed doors. Rouche was confident that Johns wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

  The falling snow was hindering his vision. He was careful to keep his trigger finger moving before it could stiffen and slow in the cold.

  “It’s decision time!” Johns shouted to his audience. “Speak up so that the world can hear you,” he instructed Rouche. “Who do you want to die? Answer or I’ll kill them all.”

  Rouche remained silent.

  Johns groaned in frustration: “OK . . . Have it your way. Five seconds!”

  Rouche met Baxter’s eye. She had no way out.

  “Four!”

  He glanced at the family. The father was holding his hands over his younger daughter’s eyes.

  “Three!”

  Rouche sensed the room of camera phones at his back.

  He needed more time.

  “Two!”

  “Rouche . . .” said Baxter.

  He looked at her desperately.

  “One!”

  “. . . I trust you,” she told him, closing her eyes.

  She heard Rouche move, the crack of a gunshot, the air whistling past her ear, the shattering glass, and the muffled impact all at once. She felt the pressure release beneath her chin, the restricting arm fall away . . . the presence behind her vanish.

  When she opened her eyes again, Rouche looked shaken, still standing with the weapon pointed directly at her. She watched a bloodstained snowflake dance in the air between them before it plunged over the edge of the building to join the rest of the crime scene five hundred feet below.

  Her temple began to throb from where the bullet had grazed her as their backup ran out to join them. The traumatized parents were sobbing inconsolably in relief and shock, in desperate need of some words of reassurance, just somebody to tell them out loud that they were safe.

  Rouche slowly lowered his weapon.

  Without uttering a word to any of them, Baxter headed back inside, swiping a bottle of wine from one of the vacated tables as she passed, before sitting at the deserted bar to pour herself a generous glass.

  Chapter 35

  Monday, 21 December 2015

  11:20 P.M.

  Rouche parked the Audi outside number 56, a powder-blue town house set on an affluent side street, the designer wreaths adorning the doors more fashion statement than decoration. Outdoor Christmas lights pulsed in white and gold, content in the knowledge that there wasn’t a single plastic Santa Claus in sight. Old-fashioned lampposts lined the street, stark black towers against the snow, like urban lighthouses warning of the hidden dangers concealed just below the surface. Their warm orange glow was charming but served as a reminder as to why the rest of the city had upgraded to uglier varieties that actually gave off some light.

  Rouche trod in a puddle of slush as he stepped out of the car and slipped around to the passenger door. He pulled it open and Baxter dropped out. Half catching her, he dragged her across the pavement to the bottom of the steps that led up to the front door. Rouche could feel the wounds beneath his bandages stinging as he picked her up, ringing the doorbell with a carefully aimed swing of Baxter’s feet.

  An energy-sapping forty seconds later, he heard someone rushing down the stairs. The locks clicked and then a man, who had apparently been playing badminton in his pajamas, peered around the door before throwing it wide open:

  “Oh my Christ, she’s dead!” gasped Thomas as he looked down at Baxter’s limp body in his arms.

  “Huh? No! God, no! She’s just drunk,” explained Rouche, turning Baxter’s top end toward Thomas as proof. Her head lolled forward, and her mouth hung open. Reasonably confident that she was still with them, he gave her a shake. She groaned. “Very drunk,” he added.

  “Oh . . . right,” said Thomas, relieved and surprised in equal measure. “God, I’m sorry. Do come in. I’m being extremely rude. Ummm . . . Shall we get her up to the bedroom, then?”

  “Bathroom,” suggested Rouche, struggling to support her, suspecting that Thomas’s use of the word “we” meant that he wouldn’t be taking her off his hands after all.

  “Bathroom. Of course.” Thomas nodded, closing the front door behind them. “It’s upstairs.”

  “Fantastic,” puffed Rouche, staggering across the hallway.

  He was a little surprised by Thomas. He was certainly handsome in a wholesome catalog-cardigan-model sort of way, but he’d been expecting someone . . . Now that he thought about it, Rouche had absolutely no idea what he’d been expecting.

  He followed Thomas through the bedroom and into the en-suite bathroom, where he was finally able to deposit Baxter next to the toilet. Almost instantly, she reanimated and pulled herself up to the bowl. Rouche held her hair back for her as she was sick. Thomas, meanwhile, crouched on the other side of her with a glass of water.

  “Thomas, by the way,” he introduced himself, habit making him offer out a hand that Rouche was clearly unable to take. “Right. Sorry,” he said, taking his unshaken appendage back.

  “Rouche.”

  “Ah, you’re Rouche.” He smiled, looking down in concern as Baxter slumped back onto the floor between them. “I’ve never seen her like this before,” he admitted, flushing the toilet.

  Rouche managed to hide his surprise both that Baxter had chosen to share her ongoing struggle with him but not with her boyfriend of eight months and that Thomas could possibly be that utterly unobservant.

  It was Thomas’s turn to grab a handful of Baxter’s hair as she climbed back up the toilet.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Rouche didn’t feel it was his place to say. What Baxter chose to tell him was her business. He shrugged apologetically: “Open case and all that.”

  Thomas nodded, suggesting that Baxter had already used that line on him before. He changed the subject:

  “You and Emily must be very close.”

  “Who?”

  Baxter raised a floppy hand.

  “Oh, Baxter! I suppose we
. . . Yeah,” said Rouche, realizing just how much they had been through together during their short time on the case, a lifetime’s worth of horrors. “Yes,” he said decisively. “She’s very, very special.”

  Baxter vomited loudly.

  Rouche was back on hair-holding duty.

  Once she was done, he got to his feet.

  “It looks like you’ve got everything under control here,” Rouche told Thomas. “I can show myself out.” Then he remembered something. “I’ve got a . . . silly present for her out in the car.”

  “You’re more than welcome to put it under the tree with the others,” said Thomas. “And, please, take the car tonight. I can drop her at work in the morning.”

  Rouche nodded appreciatively and went to leave.

  “Rouche.”

  He turned back.

  “She doesn’t really tell me everything that’s going on,” started Thomas, submitting his entry for Understatement of the Year. “Just . . . you know, if you could . . . just . . . look after her.”

  Rouche hesitated. He wouldn’t make Thomas a promise he couldn’t keep.

  “One more day,” he said evasively before leaving the room.

  Baxter woke up in Thomas’s arms. The cold bathroom tiles pressed into her bare legs and she was instantly conscious of her scar even without looking at it. Her trousers were crumpled up in the corner, but she was still wearing her sweat-dampened shirt. They were both wrapped in a bath towel, and Thomas was wedged uncomfortably between the toilet and the wall.

  “Shit,” she whispered, angry with herself.

  She wriggled out of his hold and slowly stood up, swaying as she adjusted to the new altitude. Carefully, she headed downstairs.

  The Christmas-tree lights were blinking, a lone source of light and warmth in the dark house. She crossed the room and slumped down in front of it, crossing her legs as she watched the colorful bulbs take turns to shine. After a few hypnotic minutes, she noticed the pretty angel peering down at her from the top of the tree. Lennox’s “reassuring” words about their fallen colleague returned to her like an unwelcome voice inside her head: “I guess God just needed another angel.”

  Baxter got to her feet, reached up, and tossed the fragile ornament onto the sofa. Feeling better, she began sorting through the pile of presents to which she had not contributed.

  She had adored Christmas when she was younger. But in recent years the degree of celebration had only extended as far as the usual five festive movies in December and perhaps crashing somebody else’s Christmas dinner, on their insistence, should she get out of work in time.

  She reached for the remote control and switched on the television, turning the volume down until it was barely more than a buzzing in the speakers. She was irrationally excited to find a Christmas-themed rerun of Frasier, and then, unable to keep the smile off her face, she started separating the presents into three piles. Most were for her, of course. Echo hadn’t had a bad haul, but Thomas’s was pathetic.

  She picked up an unfamiliar and oddly shaped gift to read the tag:

  Merry Xmas, Baxter. His name’s Frankie. Rouche x

  Intrigued, fueled by the excitement of her private mini-Christmas, and in need of an approximate price so as not to look tight/overly keen when reciprocating the gesture, she tore the wrapping paper open and looked down at the orange-hatted penguin in her hands, the same stuffed toy that she had admired back at Rouche’s house . . . that had belonged to his daughter.

  She stared at the silly-looking bird. Her disbelief that Rouche would want her to have something of such importance was outweighed by a feeling of unease, a suspicion that he no longer felt he needed it, that whatever final test they were about to be confronted with, he did not expect to be coming back.

  She placed Frankie on her crossed legs and pulled the large gift bag from Edmunds and Tia closer. She reached inside and found the blank white envelope sitting on top.

  She had forgotten all about it.

  She took it out and held it in her hands, just above Frankie, reminding her of her unfounded suspicions about Rouche, her initial irritation with Edmunds, her best friend, who pleaded with her every time not to take his illegal reports on Thomas. She pictured Thomas, be-toweled and more than likely stuck in the bathroom upstairs, where he had spent the night taking care of her.

  She realized that she was smiling just at the thought of her bumbling boyfriend. She tore the envelope into several pieces, showered the rubbish over the tattered wrapping paper, and continued dividing out their presents.

  Chapter 36

  Tuesday, 22 December 2015

  9:34 A.M.

  Baxter followed the signs for the Bakerloo line, descending deeper beneath the city into Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. She had tied her hair up into a ponytail and plastered herself in the few items of colorful makeup that had been gifted to her over the years—most a not-so-subtle hint from her mother to “stop looking like a vampire.” The disguise was effective enough, however, and she had barely recognized herself in the mirror after she’d finished.

  She followed the crowds onto the platform. Halfway along, she spotted her destination and stopped outside a gray door adorned with the London Underground logo and a sign that read:

  NO ENTRY—STAFF ONLY

  She knocked, hoping she was in the right place and not trying to gain entry to a cleaning cupboard.

  “Who is it?” a female voice called from inside.

  Several people were within earshot, and she was not about to yell her name in front of them after going to the trouble of painting herself up like a clown.

  She knocked again.

  The door opened a cautious inch, but then Baxter shoved her way through into the darkened room. The woman quickly locked the door behind her, while the two other technical officers continued setting up the racks of monitors, radio base units, frequency boosters, computers, and encrypted relay stations, converting the sparse office into a fully functional tactical command station.

  Rouche was already there, sticking an assortment of maps up next to a list of radio call signs.

  “Morning,” he greeted her.

  He reached into his pocket and handed over her car keys, making no mention of the events precipitating the need to borrow them in the first place or of her alarmingly colorful new face.

  “Thanks,” Baxter replied curtly, shoving them into her coat pocket. “How long till we’re all up and running?”

  “Ten . . . fifteen minutes?” one of the people crawling around under the tables replied.

  “We’ll come back then, then,” she told the room ineloquently.

  Rouche took the hint and followed her out onto the platform to speak in private.

  By the time he’d returned to the flat the previous night, footage of the shooting had already spread to every major news channel in the world, immortalizing him in grainy video as he saved Baxter’s life. As a result, he had neglected to shave that morning, the dark shadow a notable change to the clean-cut agent’s appearance. He had also combed back his quiff, exposing the grayer layers beneath, a look that actually suited him far better.

  “You’re a bit of a silver fox today, aren’t you?” Baxter smiled as they strolled to the far end of the platform, passing a huge poster for Andrea’s book.

  “Thanks. And you . . . well, you . . .”

  He was struggling.

  “I look like a bingo nan,” said Baxter, unamused, amusing Rouche. “The FBI have elected to grace us with their presence,” she said quietly. “They wish to ‘assist in any way possible to bring to a close these atrocious acts of barbarism.’ Translation: they can’t piss off back home without Green, but MI5 aren’t done waterboarding him yet, so they might as well stick around and shoot somebody.”

  “Yeah, I’d worked that much out myself,” said Rouche, a subtle nod toward the enormous ponytailed man standing a little farther along the platform. “Steven Seagal over there’s been choosing a chocolate bar for nearly an hour now.
”

  “For Christ’s sake,” huffed Baxter. “Report from the night shift: two more Puppets were picked up overnight.”

  “So . . . ten to go?”

  “Ten to go.” She nodded.

  “And our Azazel, whoever he may be,” added Rouche.

  They stood silently for a moment as a train clattered to a stop.

  Baxter used the interruption to compose what she wanted to say, although she didn’t feel as though she could admit to opening his gift early and would probably have avoided the inevitably emotional conversation anyway.

  “We’re both gonna get through this,” she told him, watching the train departing to avoid his eye. “We’re so nearly there. I know you believe that today is some sort of test or something, but we can only do what we can do. Don’t take any stupid risks or—”

  “Do you know what I was thinking about last night?” Rouche interrupted. “I never answered your question.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “How someone who’s supposed to be intelligent and spends their life looking for evidence could ever believe in something as groundless and illogical as . . . ‘sky fairies,’ wasn’t it?” he asked with a smile.

  “I really don’t want to get into this right now,” said Baxter, cringing at the memory of her vicious outburst on the plane.

  “This is the perfect time to get into it.”

  Another train decelerated into the station before a mass game of musical chairs played out over ten seconds of chaos, the losers’ forfeit: hold a diseased pole or fall over the moment it sets off again.

  “I was like you,” started Rouche. “You know, before. I thought faith was just something for the weak—a delusion to help get them through their overwhelming lives . . .”

  The way that Rouche had described it reminded her of how she had felt about counseling before it had saved her.

  “. . . but then, when what happened . . . happened, I just couldn’t even process the idea that I’d lost them forever, that I’d never get to be with them again, to hold them, that my two girls and everything they were was just gone. They were too important, too special, to just not exist anymore, you know?”