He didn’t drop the Walther.
Kask tried to push her away, but her momentum was too much. He couldn’t adjust his feet. He might have been physically stronger, but surprise, momentum, and the sheer awkwardness of Frankie’s attack took him off balance.
The woman’s voice shouted from downstairs.
She couldn’t make out the words.
But there was fire in them.
Again and again the sounds rose. Demanding.
The hammering of footsteps up the stairs.
Her running buddy yelled, ‘You can’t go up there!’
Frankie clung onto Kask, sinking her fingers into his eyes.
He screamed.
‘You fucking bitch,’ Kask hissed, clawing at her hands as she sank her fingernails in deeper. He had her by the wrists, gun sacrificed.
She wouldn’t let go.
She couldn’t.
Letting go meant dying.
And she wasn’t dying.
Not here.
Not like this.
‘You’re dead you fucking cunt, you’re fucking dead!’
‘Then you die with me,’ Frankie rasped, feeling the wetness of blood or tears on her fingers as she clawed at his eyes.
She fought him, desperately trying to wrench her hands free of his iron grip, but it was vice-like, unbreakable.
And then the sudden explosion of pain as he slammed his head into her face. It was sheer black blinding agony. She couldn’t see. She had no control over her hands. She tried to fight him but there was nothing. The impulses weren’t reaching her muscles. She was going to die here.
And then there was no pain.
There was only darkness.
Silence. Deafening. All consuming.
There was no light at the end.
This was death.
And it was ugly.
She felt the blood on her face and his weight on her body.
She tried get out from under him, to crawl into the bedroom, as though that could somehow save her.
She wiped the blood away from her face and saw the madness of Kask staring at her, filled with hate, tears of blood streaming down his face where she had gouged the meat away. He looked like a thing out of Hell. Possessed.
He raised the Walther, the dead eye coming down level with her chest.
She couldn’t get away.
There was nowhere to crawl.
He stood over her, looking down through the tracks of those damned tears.
‘You die,’ he said.
On her back, looking up at him, Frankie held her hands up across her face, like she couldn’t bear to watch the bullet end her life. She was 13mm from the afterlife. That was the distance his trigger finger had to travel. 13mm.
Unlucky for some.
Frankie arced her back and slammed her foot up into his testicles so hard the surgeons would have needed to fish them out of his throat.
The gun fell from his grip as he tried to protect his testicles, too little, too late.
He crumpled.
Frankie kicked out, trying to kick the gun away, under the bed. But the sudden movement brought another searing stab of pain that lanced through her skull.
She raised her hand to the pain. Her fingers came away red and sticky.
Her vision swirled again, but at least this time she was already on the floor.
SIXTY-SEVEN
The man opened the door.
Peter recognized him. He was Frankie’s running buddy from the compound. Up close he was thin, weedy, and he wasn’t stopping Mirjam. She pushed past him like he wasn’t there, ignoring the gun in his hand.
That freaked Peter out.
‘You can’t go up there,’ Frankie’s running buddy yelled at her back but she was already charging up the stairs.
Peter followed her inside. He had the borrowed Walther in his hand, the weapon aimed squarely at the ineffectual guard. ‘Drop your gun,’ he said, the silence between that last syllable and the gun hitting the floor shattered by the single shot ringing out up above.
For one heart-stopping second Peter thought the One Worlder had pulled the trigger, but the guy’s gun was on the floor.
‘On your knees, now, get down.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the man until he’d cuffed him to the banister at the foot of the stairs.
He couldn’t let himself think about what that gunshot meant.
He took the stairs two and three at a time, charging up to the landing.
A second gunshot tore through the house.
He couldn’t see what was happening up there.
‘Frankie!’ he yelled into the echoing silence that was worse than the thunder of gunfire for what it meant.
He took the scene in, freeze-frame.
Mirjam Rebane stood over Kask. The disgraced detective’s weapon was out of reach on the carpet, blood in a pool around it. Frankie was slumped up against the side of the bed. She’d dragged the duvet down with her weight. It stained red behind her.
He didn’t care if Kask was alive. His world reduced to Frankie.
‘Call an ambulance,’ he yelled, rushing into the room. He ran through Kask’s blood. Mirjam didn’t move. Shock. Her weapon hung loosely by her side.
He hunkered down beside Frankie.
‘Stay with me, kiddo,’ he said, seeing her try to smile as the blood bubbled around her lips. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’ She was losing too much blood.
He looked up at Mirjam. ‘For God’s sake snap out of it. Call a fucking ambulance.’
He eased Frankie to the floor, then pulled the duvet off the bed.
He sat on the floor cradling her head in his lap.
Blood oozed into his trousers.
He brushed the hair away from Frankie’s eyes.
The blood came from the side of her head. Not a bullet. Please God not a bullet, he thought, pressing a clean part of the white duvet up against the only wound he could see to stem the bleeding. Anything but that. ‘Come on, Frankie, work with me here. You’re a stubborn cow, be stubborn.’
He saw the flicker of a smile.
Mirjam spoke rapidly into her radio. He had no idea what she was saying, but he hoped to Christ the word ambulance was in there somewhere.
‘Officer down,’ he yelled, trying to make sure the dispatcher grasped the urgency.
He didn’t even see Mirjam. She wasn’t there. It didn’t matter that they’d slept together a couple of days ago. She had no space in his head.
‘Come on, Frankie, if you die on me I’ll bloody kill you.’
‘I’ll … haunt … you …’ she managed.
‘Like fuck you will.’
‘I’ll go down to meet the paramedics,’ Mirjam said. ‘What a fucking mess.’
She left him with Kask’s body. He heard her make another call as she went down the stairs. He couldn’t understand a word. Where was their back-up? This was an utter shit-show. He hoped she was tearing whoever was supposed to be covering them a new arsehole. No fucking SWAT. It was ridiculous.
But she’d saved Frankie’s life.
He heard the sound of sirens racing death to reach them.
‘Soon,’ he promised the woman in his arms.
He heard something then, only a couple of words, before Mirjam Rebane left the building.
‘It’s taken care of.’
Frankie moved in his arms. He couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. He soothed her. ‘They’re nearly here, I promise. You don’t need to do anything more complicated than breathing, OK? Just focus all your strength on that. Please. I really don’t want to tell Akardi I’ve lost another partner. That would just be fucking careless.’
At least she was smiling.
At least he thought she was smiling.
IN THE DARKNESS …
She was sure she heard a gunshot. There was no sound in the world like it. So brutal. So angry. It raged. Another. Two shots. What was happening?
Then she heard footsteps heavy on the stairs, running.
&n
bsp; She had imagined the layout of the building a million times, each time it was different. She tried to imagine it again.
An outsider threatened the family.
They were under attack.
The Blind had forced their way into the sanctuary. They were going to undo everything John had achieved.
‘Help me,’ she cried out, her voice too weak to reach clear of the hole. She felt rather than heard the rats moving about in the darkness with her. She pressed up against the cold clay wall of the hole.
There was only silence.
Darkness.
Were they dead? The man who tossed food down to her? Was she alone now? What if no one came for her? If they forgot about her completely?
She was lost.
Irma wrapped her arms around her knees, drawing them up to her chest.
She wanted this to be over.
But more than anything she desperately didn’t want to fail John in this final test.
She would not fail him.
She would prove that she was special.
She had to ignore the voices in her head and concentrate.
She felt movement around her. The rats brushing up against her skin. She didn’t move.
A different kind of movement followed down into the darkness. Doors opening and closing. Sirens. It was hard to concentrate. It was so loud.
Irma rocked up against the clay wall, needing it to anchor her before she spiralled.
People came and went.
She tried to call out, but there was nothing.
Her throat was too dry to make a sound, her voice stolen by the hole.
All she could do was sit in the darkness and pray that The Shepherd still loved her.
He wouldn’t forget her.
She was his special one.
That was what he’d promised her.
Always that.
She was special.
His special one.
More noise. Disassociated sounds. Voices. And then she heard the door that led down into the hole open and saw a crack of light high above.
Irma shrank back, deeper into the darkness, not wanting to be seen, trapped, wanting to be saved. To get out of the hole. But she couldn’t fail. Not now. Not when she was so close.
She held her breath as the iron lid that closed the pit over her head was pulled all the way back and light streamed down into her prison.
‘Irma?’ the voice said. ‘It’s all over. I promise. You’re safe. It’s over.’
A man’s voice, soft, gentle. English, not like The Shepherd. She didn’t recognize it.
Who was Irma?
Was that her?
‘Over.’
The word came out as no more than a dry whisper, barely escaping her lips, but for Irma Lutz it was all the sound in the world. It was a chorus.
She had no idea who the man was, but she believed him. The Shepherd had sent him. She had passed the test. She had done it. It was over.
A rope came down.
She tried to put the harness on, but her arms refused to obey even the simplest instructions. All she wanted to do was to lie down again and let the rats crawl over her.
‘I’ve got you,’ he promised, pulling the rope back up.
She thought that it was another test, to offer hope and snatch it away at the last moment, one last lie to try and break her.
She would not fail The Shepherd.
She didn’t have to wait long for the rope to come down again. There was a loop fashioned at the end, no harness this time. ‘All you have to do is put your foot in it, sweetheart, I’ve got you. You tell me when you are ready and I’ll pull you up.’
She had to try twice before the word came out, ‘Ready.’
She felt the rope grow taut in her hands, and then she began to ascend, rising slowly hand over hand, into the light.
It felt like she was being raised into heaven.
Her saviour waited there for her.
He reached for her, lifting her up and taking her into his arms.
‘It’s over,’ he promised again, this stranger.
SIXTY-EIGHT
It was the first time he’d set foot in a church since Stefan Karius had tried to crucify him. He wasn’t exactly eager to cross the threshold. He looked to his partner for reassurance.
Mirjam Rebane nodded, ready. She had the warrant. He didn’t have power of arrest in Estonia. ‘Ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said, and pushed open the door.
The Shepherd was at the front, in his pulpit, his voice amplified by huge speakers. His sermon faltered as he saw the newcomers, but he gathered his wits. ‘That darkness is there in all of our souls, my brothers and sisters, but we cannot give in to it when it tries to seduce us away from reason. Together we are stronger than the devil, together we are one family,’ and as he uttered those two words the entire congregation, three-hundredfold, echoed, ‘We are One World,’ their joyous voices drowning out The Shepherd.
He smiled beneficently down on his flock.
Peter Ash walked slowly down the aisle, side by side with Mirjam Rebane though marriage was the furthest thing from any of their minds. Heads turned as they walked by.
‘John Shepherd,’ Peter called out, ‘you are under arrest for conspiracy to murder Annja Rosen, Danika Putin, and William Bray, the unlawful imprisonment of Irma Lutz, and a shitload of other crimes we’re in the process of working out. You just won the criminal conspiracy lottery, holy man. Say goodbye to your sheep now, there’s a good boy.’
‘The Blind seek to bring us down, my children. They come with their lies.’
‘And handcuffs,’ Peter said. ‘Don’t forget those.’
‘Do not rage against them. Pity them, for they know not what they do.’
‘I don’t know about Mirjam, but I know exactly what I’m doing, John. I’m making the world a better place without you.’
Mirjam climbed the few short steps to the pulpit.
John didn’t fight her, he held out his hands, palms up, like a martyr.
SIXTY-NINE
‘The docs tell me you’ll live,’ Peter Ash said. ‘At least that’s less paperwork for me.’
He’d thought about bringing flowers, but he didn’t think Frankie was that kind of woman. Then he’d thought about grapes, and figured worst case, he liked grapes so it would give him something to eat while he sat with her. He’d eaten half of them before he walked into the room.
‘So they say. With luck they might even let me out.’
‘I brought you some clothes,’ he said, holding up the bag with Elsa’s old jogging bottoms and sweatshirt.
‘Thanks, I think,’ she said. ‘You found Irma?’
He nodded. ‘She’s here. She’s a mess. But she’s alive and she’s getting the care she needs. I don’t know how long she’d been down in that hole, or how often she’d been fed. She’s skin and bone. They’ll transfer her to a psychiatric unit when she’s fit enough. I’m not going to lie, there’s no easy happy ending here. They’ve fucked with her pretty badly. She doesn’t even know her own name. She keeps thinking this is all a test.’
‘But she’s in the right place. That’s all that matters. They haven’t got her any more. Now we just have to hope they can fix the damage that has been done.’
‘How much do you know about her?’
‘Not much.’
‘There was stuff in that house. It’s going to take Laura some serious work to sort through it all and figure out what was going on but this wasn’t what I expected. She’s got skills, proper computer-genius-level skills.’
‘Which is why she was here.’
‘And why One World targeted her,’ Peter said. ‘I talked to one of her professors about her. She’s a proper Rain Man level computer genius, you know the whole “sees code in her head” bit.’
‘OK, so they wanted her for her talent, that’s pretty much what Shepherd said to me every time we talked, they wanted to use my unique talent.’
Peter
nodded. ‘They were using her to run some kind of computer fraud. It was generating a lot of money for them. A lot. We got a confession from your running buddy, Stefan Koyata. He’s rolling over on Shepherd in return for immunity. You ask me, I think he’s got a crush on you.’
‘Shut up,’ Frankie said.
‘He’s given us the driver—’
‘Tomas,’ Frankie said.
‘Yep, he’s put him behind the wheel of the car that killed the writer, Bray.’
‘Jesus.’
‘That’s not even scratching the surface, this boy wants to sing. We’re talking blackmail, cyber-terrorism, sex-trafficking, drugs. The Shepherd has his fingers in every pie you can imagine. He’s even offered up a dark-web site where the guy is trading children. He’s one sick fuck.’
‘Will it stick?’
‘That’s down to the advocates. We do the legwork, they do the locking up. But we’ve got him. Mirjam and I just brought him in. She’s taking him to lock-up to be processed now. He’s not going to be tending to his flock for a very long time.’
‘You saw the photographs on the stairs? You need to talk to every single one of them. Get their statements. That’s his trophy cabinet.’
‘We’re on it.’
‘We?’
‘Mirjam, the woman who saved your life.’
‘She killed Kask.’
‘She saved your life.’
Frankie shook her head. ‘No. She murdered him. He was unarmed. She walked into the room, stood over him as he begged, and executed him. Two shots. Chest and head. She wasn’t leaving it to chance.’
Before he could argue, explain that he knew her, if not how well he knew her, the phone in his pocket vibrated.
It was Laura.
‘Hey, Law, I’m with Frankie now. You want to say hi to our wounded warrior?’
He put her on speaker.
‘We’ve got a problem, Pete.’
He didn’t say a word.
‘It’s Shepherd. He’s gone.’
‘What do you mean gone?’
‘He didn’t make it to the lock-up. He’s in the wind.’
‘He can’t just disappear. What about Mirjam? I left him in cuffs in the back of her squad car.’
The Black Shepherd Page 28