Flynn had thought she was dead and clearly she was not. But he had not imagined the blood. Her clothes were heavy with it all down her left side. It still pumped, thick and slow, from entry and exit wounds at her waist, six inches apart and neatly transected by the side-seam of her shirt. Her eyes under the lowered lids were deep with shock and her skin had lost its roseate glow. Only sheer determination—professionalism—was keeping her on her feet.
Incredibly, Flynn was moved to help her. It had to be his hormones thinking: he knew what she was there for. He started to put Shimoni behind him. “Laura, let me—”
Professionals do not jerk their guns. They do not do anything with them except fire them. Laura’s gun remained where it was, rock-steady on the centre of Flynn’s face; her eyes flicked at him instead. “Stay where you are, Mickey.” The breath was catching in her throat. Cramping pain in her left side kept her from drawing the long, slow, deep breaths she needed. That did not matter with him being so close. She could put the bullet through the pupil of his eye at this range.
Flynn could not believe that she meant to go on with this. “Laura, that’s the police. Let me get them. They’ll have you in a hospital in ten minutes, you’ll be all right.”
And Laura Wade could not believe that, after everything that had happened to and around and because of him, he was still such an innocent. She shook her head minutely. Then she said slowly, enunciating clearly, “Mickey, I have to kill you.”
He stared at her, still without any real comprehension. He jerked a hand towards the cottage. “They’ll be here in a minute. They’ll hear the gun. The state you’re in, you can’t make a run for it. You’ll—”
“Go to jail?” She smiled, half amused and half malicious. “Not for killing you I won’t. Killing you won’t cost me an extra day, not an extra hour. For bombing an airliner with two hundred and twenty people on board they’ll give me the maximum they can. You might rate a line on the charge-sheet, in the interests of tidying up, but they can’t actually do anything to me for killing you. A line of type is all your life is worth.”
Shimoni believed her. “Oh no,” she said in a low voice. Then she said it again, and again, and the pitch of her voice rose until she was screaming it in an insane litany while Flynn, shaken, held her by the arms to stop her throwing herself at the woman with the gun. “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!”
“Leah. Leah!” Flynn bent down to look her in the face. “Listen. I think maybe Laura and I can work this out. If we can just have a bit of time alone. Will you do that for me? Will you find Donnelly and have him keep his distance while we get something sorted? Laura, what do you say—is that OK?”
Wade had moved a little to put a tree at her back and seemed to be leaning on it. Her grip on the gun was unaffected. She shrugged negligently. “Sure. She can go.”
“Mickey, she means to kill you!” Shimoni’s eyes were wild, not with hysteria but with a very real appreciation of what was happening.
He shook his head to reassure her. “I know what she said. It isn’t going to happen. Laura and me—Well, she isn’t going to kill me. Unless Donnelly barges in here and forces her hand. Will you stop him?”
She was unconvinced. He had left her no option. She snatched a glance at the older woman, hating her.
Flynn misinterpreted the look. “She won’t hurt you. Will you, Laura?” Wade smiled remotely and shook her head. “Go on. Go now.” He pushed her firmly towards the track, the shapeless bulk of Fahad’s body marking the way. The second step she took alone, hesitantly, looking back. Then she began to run.
When they were alone Wade said, her voice slowing to a drawl, “You don’t believe that, do you?—that I’ll let you live because we were good in bed. That really would be too naive.”
Flynn shrugged. “I don’t know what to expect of you any more. I just wanted her away from here.”
Lazily she grinned. “Are you in love again, Mickey?”
That stung like a slap in the face, because he had been and plainly she had not, not even for a moment. His jaw came up pugnaciously. “Isn’t it female spiders that use their mates and then eat them? The Black Widow—that’s where she got her name. Come on then, spider lady, do what you came here for.”
Wade’s mouth twitched amiably. Her strength was leaching out with the blood coursing down her side. It was sapping her aggression, making her tolerant. Soon she would be too weak to finish the job, complete her last contract. She knew it would be the last contract, and it was important to her—to her self-esteem—to get it right. She had taken money to destroy the photograph that incriminated her clients and more to destroy the photographer.
She held no grudge against Flynn for being the job that killed her—for she had no intention of going to prison, if Fahad’s bullet would not rescue her she would save one of her own to do it. But her last contract could not be considered fulfilled until he was dead. It was as simple as that. She could not afford to take a personal view. He was outstanding business to be finished, a loose end to be tied.
She said, “I don’t think I can move from this tree. It’ll be pleasanter for both of us if you’ll turn round.”
When there was no answer at the front door Donnelly hurried round the house looking at the curtained windows. But at the kitchen window the curtains had been pulled back and he saw Sergeant Ferris, just beginning to stir on the floor as his wits trickled back from wherever Flynn’s plaster fist had despatched them. Donnelly went to knock down the back door but found it unlocked and flung it open.
He shouted Flynn’s name and Shimoni’s without response, checked the bedrooms and found no-one. He tugged Ferris more or less upright against the washing-machine and held a wet towel—he did not know it was the dog’s—against his face, and called him back to explain what he knew of what had happened.
Then one of his men called him outside and pointed, and over the low garden wall he saw a figure running towards them out of the margins of the little wood. He knew it was not Flynn; a moment later he recognised Shimoni and hurried to meet her.
Her face was swollen, her eyes red-rimmed. She was panting with distress and effort so that she could hardly speak. There were twigs in her hair and on her clothes. Donnelly caught her by the arms. “What is it? Where’s Flynn?”
She thrust a shaking hand back the way she had come. Her hair fell in her face. Her voice surged uncontrollably with the suck of her lungs. “In there. With her. She’s going to kill him.”
Donnelly’s eyes sharpened. “Laura Wade? Is she armed?” It was a foolish question but he needed confirmation.
“She killed Fahad. Fahad shot her, and she killed him. Now she’s going to shoot Mickey.”
Taken aback, Donnelly blinked. “Fahad’s here?”
“Damn Fahad,” cried Shimoni. “She’s going to kill Mickey! He thinks he can talk her out of it if you’ll stay away but he can’t. She let me go because I was in the way—she’s hurt, she couldn’t be sure of covering us both—but she isn’t going to let him go whatever he says. She’s going to die here—Fahad’s bullet or one of yours or maybe her own, I don’t know but she’s not going to walk away—she’ll finish this job because it’ll be the last thing she does. For God’s sake, do something!”
He stared at her a moment longer. She almost saw cogs spinning in his grey eyes. Then he thrust her into other hands. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I can change her mind.” Then, calling for a marksman and, inexplicably, a radio, he started for the spinney at a run.
Flynn would not turn his back. He doubted that it would make much difference to him whether the bullet went through his face or the back of his head, and he was not concerned to make it pleasanter for his murderer.
She was dying on her feet. The blood had soaked all the way down her trouser kg and was pooling in the dirt at her foot. Flynn might have drawn some hope from the certainty that she must soon pass out, except for the other certainty that the last thing she would do as she felt her grip slipping was blow his brain out. She was a professional. She would not leave it a moment longer than she could afford to.
She would also kill him, right away, if anyone else came near them or if he made a move towards her gun. He knew that, close as they were, there was nothing he could do—not reach her, not run or dive for cover—faster than she could send on its way the bullet with his name on it. One would be all it would take, and she would fire at the first sign of interference because she would not be confident of seeing the second.
Flynn did not know if he had any real hope of coming through this, but if he had an ally it was time. There was not much he could do, but he could avoid making it easier for her. Forcing himself to move slowly he folded his long body like a deck-chair and went down cross-legged to the ground. He bridged his arms across his knees and looked up at her. He wondered if she could see that he was trembling. He wondered if she would be pleased or dismayed or indifferent if she knew how sick-to-his-stomach scared of her he was. The Black Widow. But it had been more than mere professionalism she had brought to his bed. It had been pleasure.
He said shakily, “I don’t see why you couldn’t write me a Dear John like anybody else.”
She laughed at that, weakly, but it made her cough and coughing hurt. She wiped her mouth with the hand that did not hold her gun. “I couldn’t see us resolving custody of the stuffed parrot.” He had won it for her, ironically enough, at a shooting gallery.
They smiled together, almost like friends. Then Flynn said, very quietly, “Oh God, Laura, don’t do this.”
There was surprise, even disappointment, in her glance. She had not expected him to beg. “Sorry, Mickey. Your life has been bought and paid for.”
“Not from anyone with the right to sell it,” he retorted. “OK, you’re good at your job: I know it, now everybody’s going to know it. You don’t need my hide on the wall to prove it.”
She was getting tired, too tired to want this conversation, too tired to be trying to explain it to him. She thought every moment—so did he—that she would bring it to its inevitable end. But actually she wanted more from him than just his life: she wanted his company as well. She was not afraid to die, but there was loneliness in the waiting. Flynn who had known her, who had cared for her, who said he loved her, was better company for these last minutes than she might have hoped for. If he could not see it out to the end with her, he could stay by her most of the way. She would know when he had come far enough.
So she talked to him instead of killing him, and she knew that her voice was beginning to slur and her eyes to slip out of focus; and she knew too, as surely as if she had it in writing, that the last faculty she would be left with would be her accuracy with the gun. There was time yet.
She said patiently, “It’s not a question of proof. It’s—Given the choice, you’d go out with a world exclusive in your camera, yes? It’s the same thing. They can say I got killed, but as long as you die first they can’t ever say I got beaten.”
“Neither of us has to die. There are other options.”
“Not for me,” she said with conviction. “And therefore not for you either.”
Donnelly heard them before he saw them, and slowed right down, signalling the marksman away to his left to do the same. Another step or two and he saw Flynn, hunched cross-legged on the ground a little like a thin Buddha and a little like a stick-insect.
Flynn saw him at the same moment and could not keep the mingled hope and fear out of his eyes, and Laura Wade—despite her own dulling senses—saw them and saw the policeman reflected as in a mirror. With startling agility in view of the amount of her blood soaking into the ground, she pushed herself off the tree supporting her, crossed the line of his vision quicker than Donnelly could have reacted even had he been armed, and dropped into a crouch behind Flynn, protected by his body at the front and a hundred-year-old beech bole behind.
Unless she saw him moving the marksman might have drawn a bead on her from the side but it was always going to be a risky shot. It became an impossible one when she fisted her left hand in Flynn’s hair and dragged his head back onto her shoulder, and pressed the muzzle of her gun into the gullet behind his jaw. He could not believe how strong she still was. Sweat broke over him in a wave.
“If you kill me stone dead with the first shot,” she remarked conversationally, “I’ll still blow his head off.”
Donnelly froze to the spot where he stood and hoped his marksman would have the sense to do the same. He said, with a nice admixture of calm and urgency, “Miss Baron, there is no need for anyone else to die. More than that, there is no point in anyone else dying—not him, not you. It’s over. The secret your clients bought protection for no longer exists. Dr. Hehn is dead. The synthetic cocaine formula he was working on died with him. Even if there was a record of it somewhere, it’s almost certainly been destroyed: his office and his laboratory have been gutted. That entire floor of the Deerings building is alight, and the Fire Brigade don’t rate their chances of saving the rest of it. You no longer have a client to consider.”
“What happened?” So he told her. She shook the cloud of dark hair, disbelieving. “You’re lying. You think you can fool me. You think you can save his skin by fooling me.” She pushed the muzzle into Flynn’s throat sharply enough to cut off his air. “You’re wrong.”
“It’s the truth,” Donnelly insisted. “I don’t altogether understand it myself, but it is the truth. I can prove it. I brought a radio.”
It took him half a minute’s increasingly desperate hunting through the airwaves to find a news broadcast, and when he did it was rattling on about the balance of trade and what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said to the Foreign Secretary and what the Foreign Secretary said back. Then there was the momentary hiatus heralding the radio equivalent of a Stop Press, which is when the producer slides an incoming report in front of the news-reader on air.
Then, with the unperturbability under fire characteristic of her kind, she read out the first account of a major fire in progress in the City of London. Early reports from the scene were that the fire at Deering Pharmaceuticals was started deliberately with an incendiary device. Although most employees had escaped, it was believed that there were casualties including Deerings’senior research chemist Dr. Dieter Hehn, recipient of this year’s Sondheim Prize for his work on antibiotics.
When the news-reader returned to her schedule with a story about a drunk and disorderly footballer, Donnelly turned the radio off. In the little wood the sounds of the twentieth century had seemed intrusive; now they were gone the silence stretched and crawled.
Donnelly said quietly, “You see? It’s all over. There’s nothing left for you to do.”
“Who did it?” she asked. “A bomb? Who’d bomb Deerings?”
“I don’t know. Yet. We’re working on it.”
“And Hehn’s dead? No. You arranged this with the radio-station, to fool me.”
Donnelly was aware of her eyes on him, watching for his response. He was deeply impressed by her ability to reason like that in her current state. He shook his head. “That sort of thing takes time to set up. I only knew you were here twenty minutes ago. I didn’t know what I’d find here until I arrived just now. I was already on my way when I heard about the fire. Hehn’s dead all right. He was shot, and then his laboratory was blown up round him.”
“Who else?”
Donnelly did not know what she meant. “Who else what?”
“Who else is dead?” So there were others at Deerings she was pledged to protect, not just the formula and its creator.
Superintendent Donnelly was an honest man. It was why he had been attracted to a career in law enforcement. He believed that honesty was not so much the best as the only policy for an honourable man. He did not fiddle his income tax. He did not speed his car except where demanded by the public interest. He had never in his life attempted to travel free on public transport.
He was, however, perfectly capable of lying like a trooper. He listed, without a flicker of conscience crossing his face, all the people he hoped she might be interested in. “Most of the people who were with him half an hour ago. His secretary, who tried to stop the intruder. Two of his assistants, a man and a woman. The company’s PR executive, Byron Spalding—”
Laura Wade let out a breath like a sigh. “I see.” She still held Flynn bent like a bow with her knee in his back and her gun in his throat. But slowly some of the tension drained away. She released her grasp of his hair, absent-mindedly patting it back into place more like a mother than a murderer. She lowered the gun so that he could breathe while she was thinking. Finally she pushed him, quite gently, from her.
He fell forward onto his hands and knees, and as quickly as he could he twisted round so that he could see her. He was still not sure if she meant to shoot him.
She smiled at him, quite kindly. “He’s right. There’s no point going any further with this. I’m not going to kill you to protect dead men’s reputations.” She looked pensively at the gun she had withdrawn from his gullet. “I suppose you want this.“ She turned it in her hand and offered it butt first, not to Donnelly who had never been closer than a dozen yards away but to Flynn.
He regarded it for a moment with fear and loathing. Then, reluctantly, still on his knees in front of her, he reached out to take it.
Her smile broadened as if she had played a clever trick on him. “’Bye, Mickey.” As his unencumbered left hand closed on the figured stock her fingers straightened the barrel and one slipped inside the trigger-guard and pushed. Without violence, without haste; with just enough pressure against the resistance of Flynn’s hand to do the job. She was looking all the way up the barrel when the hammer fell.