“Drop the gun, Cross,” Varjan said. “Or die.”
I let go of my weapon, heard it strike the concrete.
“There’s an army coming, Kristina,” I said. “You’ll never get out of here alive.”
I noticed her expression tightened when I said her name.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said. “I just wanted you to know I had nothing to do with the president’s death or the death of any of the others. I was a maid. Cleanup. That’s all.”
“Maid for who, Kristina?”
“You saw,” she said, angrier but glancing around.
“What did I see, Kristina?” I asked, hitting her given name hard.
“Stop that,” she said, shaking the gun at me, “or I’ll kill you anyway.”
Behind her in the sky, I saw the helicopter coming. And patrol cars had squealed to a stop back on Michigan, their bubbles flashing blue. From behind me, from the park, I heard tires skidding to a halt and sirens dying.
“It’s over, Kristina,” I said. “Drop the gun.”
Varjan looked at the beach and the water.
“They’ll get you out there too. Save yourself. Drop the gun.”
“The CIA takes me. No one else.”
“I can’t promise that.”
She processed my response, and then all the tension in her shoulders seemed to vanish, as if she’d come to some decision and was resigned to her fate.
“Then I take it all back,” Varjan said, her voice flat. “You’ll just have to die before me, Cross. You’ll have to lead the way into hell.”
“No—” I managed to blurt out before she pulled the trigger.
Her bullet blasted into me eight inches below my Adam’s apple.
I was hurled back and off my feet. I landed hard, choking for air in a whirling daze. I heard another shot and a third before a barrage of gunfire that was the last thing I remembered before everything vanished into darkness.