Silver (7 page)

And if he couldn’t open the door on the other side, couldn’t do it the low-key way, a chair out through the window, onto the Monster and away before anyone could stop him.

A moment later the screech of a burglar alarm kicked in and he knew exactly which house the man was in. He ran toward the sound of the siren. There was blood on the glass where the man had gone over the wall. He didn’t have a lot of choice except to follow. He boosted himself up. The shards of glass shredded his hands as his weight came down on them. Ignoring the pain, Ronan Frost heaved himself over the wall and dropped down onto the other side. The place was cluttered with empty cartons stamped with names that meant nothing to him. He tried to visualize the business side of Acorn Road and realized it was the hairdressers sandwiched between the antique store and the last of the estate agents.

“Has he come out the other side?”

“Not yet,” Lethe told him. “So watch yourself.”

He didn’t need telling twice, not with the memory of the man’s fist still imprinted on his face. He clambered in through the broken window.

There were no lights on inside, giving the other man plenty of shadows to hide in. The silhouettes of uldd-fashioned hairdryers looked like something out of an alien movie as they loomed in the darkness, with their bulbous heads and spindly skeletons all lined up against the wall. He strained, peering left and right into the darkness. He couldn’t rely upon his eyes, not in the thick darkness of the salon, so he was forced to listen harder and trust his instincts. “I know you’re in here,” he called out, not expecting an answer.

“Well aren’t you the clever one,” a woman’s voice whispered, so close to his right ear he nearly jumped out of his skin. She had an accent. It wasn’t distinct. In fact it was as though she had deliberately tried to hide it, even in those few words. He turned, reaching up a fist as she drove another sucker punch at the side of his head. He caught her wrist and wrenched it savagely downwards. He felt the small bones snap. She didn’t scream as he had expected her to. That heartbeat of expectation cost him.

Instead, she drove the heel of her left hand over the top and slammed it into his mouth, snapping his head back. She wrenched her broken arm free as Ronan stumbled back an involuntary step. He released his hold, reaching around his back instinctively for his Browning Hi-Power 9mm. Even as his hand clasped around the Mil-Tac G10 laminate grip the woman double-fisted his face, screaming when the broken bones in her right wrist grated back across each other. The agony of the blow should have knocked her out by rights. It didn’t so much as slow her down. As he doubled up she drove her knee up between his legs. He went down hard.

The pistol spilled from his fingers and skidded across the floor.

She stood over him while he tried to reach it. It was more than two feet beyond his fingertips.

“Have you made your peace with God?” she asked, walking across to the Browning. She picked it up, turned it left and right in her hand, then leveled it, drawing a steady aim on Ronan’s face. She was wearing a black balaclava. Curls of black hair crept out from beneath the hood. Cradling her broken wrist, she walked toward him slowly, kneeling until the barrel nestled up against his forehead. All it would take was the slightest shift in pressure and she would open a soul-sucking hole in the middle of his skull. With only the black wool of the balaclava around them her eyes stood out, ice-cold cobalt blue.

He could feel her breath on his face. He could feel the slight tremor of the gun against his skin. She wasn’t as cool as she made out. She was going to kill him, no doubt about that, but she wasn’t a killer. Pulling the trigger wasn’t instinctive. She had to think about it. And thinking about it meant he had a chance, even now with the gun pressed up against his skull.

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.

 She 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.

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“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.