20
My body lost the ability to think, it just acted. I dived into the open, grabbed that knobbly thing and hurled it through the door, into the courtyard… No! It struck the top of the balcony rail and fell back…
I launched myself at the bed, my fingers grabbing arms, pajamas and sheets together, using my momentum to carry us both over and off…we were falling as there was an ear-shattering crack, and a load of stuff thwacked into the wall above us.
Then for the second time that day, I landed on a hard surface and a guy landed on top of me. I lay whooping and gasping—Lucas started to fight free of the bedding, gasping more in shock, eyes wild in the moonlight. I lunged weakly and caught his pajamas, stopping him sitting up enough to be visible over the bed. He looked around, peeped over the bed, ducked down again—catching on fast?
My breath was coming back, it hadn’t been so bad a fall. I struggled into a half-sitting position. “Keep down! There’s someone on the balcony—” But an image played in my mind, of a small knobbly object, rolling to rest against the outside rim of the door. “Oh my God, I threw…”
Lucas’s face hovered before my eyes—saying my name, over and over…
The door flew open… Light flooded the room… Lucas crouched in front of me, one arm shielding me… But it was the guard who rushed towards me, eyes wide and panic-stricken. Lucas switched a very sharp kitchen knife to a throwing position, hissing wordless warning…
The guard stopped…dithered, looking anguished… Then Eduardo and a sea of vaguely familiar faces spilled through the door.
Someone was holding a hot drink to my lips and Doctor Frederick was examining me, prodding me strategically and asking me if it hurt. I kept saying no and sipping the drink—I could feel wonderful tendrils of warmth spreading out inside me, steadying the freezing, jelly-like maelstrom that was my insides. Bane kept his arms around me, kept kissing my hair and my face and murmuring comforting things. I pressed against him and sipped my way gradually into quietness.
Eduardo had brought me and Lucas to Jon’s apartment, as a comfortable safe location. Lucas sat in a nearby armchair, the dishpan in which he’d laid out his poor explosion-torn plants cradled to his chest. His eyes were alert, but he didn’t seem out-of-his-mind stressed. Eduardo had left most people outside, and everyone in here had stood guard at the hospital and counted as a familiar face. Except Jon. Lucas had looked at Jon once, gone a sickly gray color, and was now clearly pretending he wasn’t there. Because Jon was kind of a familiar face as well.
“Margaret?” said Eduardo. He’d an unusually compassionate look on his face. “I’ve played back the footage. I take it you were trying to throw the grenade into the courtyard?”
Lucas was giving me a rather similar look.
“Yes,” I sniffed, as a few straggling sobs escaped.
“I thought so. But what on earth were you doing there at this time of night?”
“Oh…” I wrestled my thoughts into order. “Well, I couldn’t sleep. Kept having nightmares in which Lucas got killed. Thought I was being paranoid after what happened earlier and tried to ignore it—now I’m thinking it was my guardian angel kicking me in the head like mad. Then I realized I’d left my wedding ring in Lucas’s room. I took it off earlier when I was bandaging his arm. Oh no,” I sobbed. “It’s still there!”
Lucas held up one finger in a ‘hang on a minute’ gesture and felt gently in his dishpan. Produced a small circle of gold with a triumphant smile. “Found it on table,” he said in a low voice, clearly trying to pretend I was the only one there, period, though he was using Latin. “Hung it on the fuchsia so not lost.”
Everyone else blinked at this choice of safe place, but I accepted the ring without surprise. “Thank you!” I slipped it back on with relief. “Are they going to be okay?” I nodded to the bowl he was nursing. “Is the fuchsia okay?”
He shrugged unhappily in response to the first question, but added, “Fuchsia not too bad. Took away from window for night.”
I tried to gather my thoughts again. “Anyway, eventually I decided to just go and get my ring—check on Lucas at the same time—sounds a bit silly, I suppose, but you know what it’s like when you get fretting in the middle of the night—well, you probably don’t.” I looked at Eduardo, but the others were nodding their understanding.
“Anyway, I slipped along to Lucas’s room, but my ring wasn’t where I left it. I was just about to give up and go home when I heard something on the balcony, and…well, you saw the rest. But you do realize they must be after Lucas, right?”
Lucas frowned in concentration as he listened, and not just because it was in Latin.
“I don’t think so,” said Eduardo. “No offense, Mr. Everington, but however much you ticked them off, it doesn’t warrant this. They were after Margaret. She’s the reason Georg Friedrich is safe in Africa giving interviews about how Reginald Hill sent him to Monaco to kill her.”
“Which Hill is denying, saying Friedrich’s making it up because he’s so grateful to Margo for his life,” remarked Snail.
“True, but not everyone believes him, by a long shot. It’s done them a lot of damage. Without even taking into account the hammering Reginald Hill’s ego took.”
I must’ve still looked doubtful, because Unicorn nodded and said grimly, “The guy threw a Lethal grenade into a room with two of his comrades in, Margo. He was clearly under orders to kill you at all and any cost And, if at all possible, to avoid either himself or any of the others being captured—alive, anyway.” For someone so thoroughly nice and honorable, it often surprised me how good U was at thinking like a bad guy. He’d have been in the wrong job otherwise, I suppose.
“They’re after Margaret, no doubt,” concluded Eduardo. “The question is, how on earth did they know she was in there?”
Unicorn, Snail and Bee looked me up and down analytically. I was still biting my lip at the mention of egos. Kyle had actually turned around in the corridor yesterday and gone back the other way when he saw me coming.
“Tracker?” said Unicorn.
“I would’ve thought so, except they stood with their backs to her—clearly they didn’t know exactly where she was.”
Lucas frowned. “Looking at…tea table, Margaret?”
He meant the little table by his two little soft chairs, where he sat with visitors, i.e. me, and Bane once. “Yes, I’d say that’s about where they were looking.”
“Fuchsia there.”
“They weren’t tracking the plant,” snorted Bumblebee, throwing up one dark-skinned hand in a ‘for goodness’ sake’ gesture.
“Not the plant, imbécile,” said Snail amiably. “He just told us he’d hung Margo’s ring on that particular plant, didn’t he?”
“So it’s the ring,” said Unicorn.
“Not again!” said Bane. That was exactly how the EuroGov had tracked him back to our secret hideout on Gozo in January.
I looked at my hand in horror.
“Sorry, Margaret, I’m going to need that.” Eduardo held out his hand.
Reluctantly I drew the ring off again.
“So,” summed up Unicorn, “They thought she was there in that room the whole time, but they waited until the dead of night to make their move.”
“Lucas, I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed.
“Not your fault,” he said calmly.
“Good job you went to check on him, though.” Eduardo looked like he’d be having nightmares of his own. “No guarantee they’d have left him alive even if they had realized it wasn’t Margaret in the bed.”
In the dark, with the ring in the room, they might easily have put a few shots into the person in the bed and left, none the wiser. I breathed slowly and carefully for a few moments.
“Are…are all three of them…definitely…?” I trailed off, the state of the room forcing itself into my mind.
“I’m sorry, Margaret, they are dead as nits,” said Eduardo. “If it makes you feel better, even the guy on the balcony who threw the thing won’t have known what hit him.”
“I wish they’d had nonLethal grenades,” I couldn’t help muttering.
“They wouldn’t have used one even if they did,” said Unicorn patiently. “Because people wake up after a nonLethal grenade, don’t you know?”
Eduardo opened his mouth, and the other VSS agents chorused, “Fifty-percent-lethal grenades, U!”
“The latest ones are up to seventy-five percent nonLethal, actually,” said Unicorn. “But Margo knows what I mean.”
“Seventy-seven point three percent nonLethal,” said Eduardo precisely, unable to bear inaccuracy when it came to statistics.
“So who were they?” someone asked quickly, before Eduardo could give us another incomprehensible lesson about how nonLethal weapons worked. Incomprehensible to me, anyway. It was all to do with electricity and magnetism—or perhaps electro-magnetism—and I still couldn’t get my head around it.
“According to their Vatican passes they were all EuroBloc nationals who’d sought sanctuary here within the last four months. We’ve been putting all such new arrivals in accommodation well away from the secure areas, just in case any of them were in fact EuroGov agents—so I’m not exactly surprised. Let’s just hope there aren’t any more of them.”
Spies or not, they were people. Probably people I’d seen and had breakfast with that morning. I swallowed hard, feeling that cold, knobbly thing in my hand again.
“I’m guessing they let that assassin in, somehow,” continued Eduardo, “then when he failed so completely, they tried to finish the job themselves with equipment he’d brought for them. I wonder who they were meant to be going after with that kit? Or whether it was just for backup purposes…” From the look in Eduardo’s eyes, he’d be following up on these questions immediately.
“Well, anyway, that’s enough to be going on with,” he added. “You get to bed, Margaret, try to sleep. And I’d like Mr. Everington to remain here as well, just to be on the safe side.”
“Take my bed, you two,” said Jon. “And I suppose Mr. Everington had better have the sofa. I can sleep on the floor.”
“Have my bed, Jon,” said Unicorn, eyeing his boss. “I don’t think I’ll be getting to it now.”
Eduardo smiled grim confirmation.
Lucas stared at me in desperate appeal, clutching his dishpan tighter than ever.
“Oh…Lucas needs new pots and everything. I don’t think it can wait until morning.”
Eduardo sighed slightly. “I’ll make sure everything he needs is brought here. Just get some sleep, Margaret, you’ll feel better.”
“Oh, of course I will, I’ll wake up, and they’ll not be dead!”
Eduardo just greeted this sarcasm with a shrug.
20 days
There’s not the slightest doubt these men got what they deserved. But I still can’t help thinking. If they weren’t fathers, they were probably registered partners. If not that, then they were surely someone’s sons. But do you think the EuroGov cares about that? To them, they were nothing but tools, just like Georg Friedrich. To them, that is all any of us are.
Margaret Verrall—blog post, ‘The Impatient Gardener’
“Y’know, I don’t think Doctor Frederick thinks Lucas is a chimpanzee anymore,” I told Father Mark that evening, laughing as I remembered Doctor Frederick’s expression when Lucas actually spoke to him—to apologize.
“I don’t think anyone thinks he’s a chimpanzee,” said Father Mark blurrily. “People probably like him a lot better all of a sudden, though.”
Bane certainly did! And we’d gained a lot in the opinion polls as news of the assassination attempts spread—at least in the early part of the day. At noon the EuroGov had launched a ‘Save Sylvia’ campaign, parading some cute little girl with cancer in front of the cameras. They must’ve had her up their sleeve, ready to distract everyone.
Bane had been pretty miserable, though, regardless of our temporary lead in the polls. “How d’you think I feel, knowing you’re safer with a madman than with me?” he’d said. “Knowing if you had been with me yesterday, you’d be…” He hadn’t even been able to finish, and he’d spent most of the day at the range, either in genuine hopes of improving his skills or just because he needed to shoot something.
I couldn’t help glancing at Father Mark. I wish I liked you the way I used to. I mean, I sort of still do, but I just can’t seem to look at you without thinking about— Oops, Father Mark was giving me the searching look he’d been turning on me more and more often since…
“I dare say,” I replied quickly. “I’m not actually sure the whole thing hasn’t done Lucas good. He seems more confident today.”
“I know what you mean. Goodness knows he was in a murderous rage earlier, though.”
I blinked. “He was?”
“Wanted to kill those guys again, himself, just for putting you in that position.”
“Oh.” There had been a bit of glint in his eye last night that I couldn’t figure out. “Did you point out that’s a bit…um…violent?”
Father Mark smiled. “I did point out that if you could forgive him, he could surely forgive three guys who couldn’t pay any more in this life and who were probably paying in the next as we spoke. He went away pretty quiet—even for him.”
“Well, probably for the best. I’ve got the impression he doesn’t get angry very easily—but he’s got a really nasty temper when he does.”
“Says the young woman who held her brother up at gunpoint.”
I stared at him, startled. Not ’cause it wasn’t true—no denying my temper had been a match for Lucas’s on that occasion—but it seemed rather a harsh thing to say. “I am really sorry about that, y’know.”
“Not sorry enough to proffer an olive branch, from what I hear.”
“What?” I choked. “I went to Kyle’s room just this morning, Father Mark! After what happened yesterday…well, if there was an olive branch, I wanted to take it. But I didn’t see any sign of one! He just talked to me in this aggrieved, self-righteous way, like I’m a silly little girl who’s obviously wrong and he can’t understand why I’m taking so long to come around to his point of view! And he’s so angry.”
Father Mark sighed. “Perhaps Kyle needs a bit more time to calm down and come to terms with Snakey’s death. I don’t think he’s dealt with that very well.”
I couldn’t help a rather bitter snort. “You don’t say.” I really, really wished I’d paid more attention to Kyle after it had happened, but it was hopeless now—he didn’t even want to speak to me.
Another sigh from Father Mark. “And this thing about him lying to Jon by omission…”
“What about it?”
“Well, you obviously think that Antonio saw enough to figure out what happened, but all he told Kyle was that Bane had hit you.”
My heart sank. I’d jumped to a wrong conclusion. Kyle hadn’t done what I’d thought he’d done. But that didn’t change all the horrible things he’d done since.
“Kyle doesn’t give a fig about Bane,” the words broke out: of everything, that was what hurt the most. “Bane could’ve died because of how Kyle acted! I tell you, it would be a heck of a lot easier if he’d just…pinned me to a gurney, carved up my face and left me to die in agony!”
Father Mark winced. No doubt he’d a pretty clear memory of finding me after Major Everington…after Lucas…had done just that. Strange feeling of disconnection…in that memory he was still The Major.
“And the way he was about Georg Friedrich!” My tongue rushed on. “He all but said he wanted to see the man dead! And he was so cruel to me! What sort of priest is he going to be?”
“He won’t be one at all if he can’t sort out this crisis he’s having,” said Father Mark quietly.
Oh. When we were little, Kyle always wanted to be a priest like Uncle Peter. Once old enough to understand what that really meant, in the world we lived in, he’d tried to forget all about the idea—but the Lord had other plans. Or so we’d all thought.
My stomach was churning. This was too much to take in. Time to change the subject, surely? I tried to think of something to say. It was so hard, smiling and chatting to Father Mark like nothing was wrong. Almost like nothing was wrong.
He was giving me that look again. “Margaret…I am really, really sorry I hurt you, you know. And…I know it must be hard for you to forget what I did, but…is there something you’re not telling me?”
The word ‘nothing’ still stuck in my throat. “Don’t be paranoid, Father Mark. I’m sorry if I’m a little distant. So much is happening at the moment; it’s hard to take it all in.” My words came out far more brusquely than I intended. Blast. I might as well have just said, “Yes, there is.”
Father Mark frowned, but the little machine Doctor Frederick had set up by the bed to monitor his blood pressure and heart rate gave a little beep. Slipping the next lot of drugs into his veins. Sleep soon claimed him.
Feeling guilty, depressed, and slightly shaken by that conversation, I set off from the hospital and found my feet taking me to Lucas’s room. With a bit of a mental shrug, I knocked. He let me in without comment on my late reappearance and made a pot of tea.
I sipped gratefully, feeling the hot brew settling my churning emotions. Lucas stared at his cooling cup in silence. The glint was gone from his eye. Father Mark really had knocked the anger out of him. Every so often, though, he glanced at a large bunch of cut flowers in a vase with a mournful look appropriate for a dear friend who’s just been told their illness is terminal.
“Who sent you those?” I asked after a few minutes of this, trying not to smile. He did like his flowers alive and growing.
He got up and fetched a little homemade cardlet—the store couldn’t stock luxuries like that.
“Kyle?” I exclaimed, as soon as I saw the writing. He did still care about me, clearly. How could I make it up with him? Angel Margaret, please soften his heart, make him ready to listen.
Lucas looked at the flowers again and sighed.
“Um, d’you want to keep them, or would you rather I took them away?”
“Meant well. I keep.” He threw them a look which added, “Poor things,” clearer than words.
Putting the card on the table, I went back to my tea. Why had I come here? It was late, I should go home, Bane would be waiting. To say nothing of the Vote-stuff needing doing.
The EuroGov had been playing a heart-rending video all day: little Sylvia talking about how she’d arrived at the hospital to have the transplant that would cure her—showing off the teddy bear she’d had packed in her bag—and how the doctors had told her she’d have to go home, they weren’t allowed to do it anymore. Followed by clips of Sylvia’s tearful parents confirming that yes, a transplant was their daughter’s only hope. Yes, Sylvia had only weeks to live. Yes, they were just hoping against hope that their daughter could hold on until the vote…and that everyone would vote to save her. Sob, sob. No interviews with the parents whose daughter had died to supply the intended transplant.
Yes, I really should’ve gone straight home to carry on with countering that vile video. S’pose I just wanted a cup of tea and a moment’s peace and quiet to absorb what Father Mark had said.
No danger of not getting that with Lucas, especially tonight. Pensive. Definitely the word. He stared into space, lost in his own thoughts.
A knock on the door. Lucas went to answer it, clearly startled. Looked at the person there for a moment, then said, very deliberately, “Hello.”
“Thought that silence must be you. Hello.” Bane’s voice. “I brought this for you.”
Lucas stepped back from the doorway, a cardboard box in his hands. “Margaret here. Come in.”
“Hi, Bane,” I said, as he followed Lucas into sight. “I’m sorry, I was about to get back.”
“S’okay,” was the surprising reply. “I wasn’t actually there.” He jerked his head towards the sounds of Lucas opening the box and grinned rather smugly. Hang on…out and about on his own? A grin spread over my own face for what felt like the first time in hours, if not days. Lucas’s face brightened—so that’s what was in the box.
I went over to admire the three healthy, flowery, undamaged plants that he lifted out, since Bane seemed so pleased with himself. Each a very different type and color but…a whiff of strong distinct fragrances…that would be how Bane had picked them.
Lucas stroked the petals and leaves and checked the soil and soon bore them to the window. Stood back and surveyed the more cheerful scene and nodded to himself. Glanced at Bane and said politely, “Thank you.”
“Thank you for saving Margo.”
Lucas considered this. Thinking the plants were unnecessary? Or the thanks were? Eventually he just said, “You’re welcome.” And after another moment, “Tea?”
Bane got that look people get when they’re trying to figure out if the offer is sincere. “Why not?”
When we finally got home and were getting ready for bed, Bane’s self-conscious air as he slipped off his light jacket caught my attention. And his cheeks were going rather pink…ah…that was why. He’d just shrugged off a shoulder holster complete with nonLee and was placing it carefully on the bedside table. Embarrassed, but very pleased with himself.
I came up and slipped my arms around him. “Danger to everyone near you with a gun in his hand, I think you said?” I murmured in his ear. “Eduardo clearly doesn’t agree.”
Bane flushed more than ever. “He said I’m not to take it out except as a last resort,” he said quickly. “I’m not like Jon; I can’t tell who it is near me the way he can. But with the vote so close and the EuroGov after you the way they are…he said he wanted me to be armed.”
“Quite right,” I told him. “I feel safer already.”
“Really?” Skeptical, but not angry.
“Really,” I said firmly. “Cross my heart and—”
“Don’t say it!” He turned around, traced his way to my lips with gentle fingers and stopped my words with a kiss.
For once, I forgot the tiredness that nowadays always seemed to claim me by this time of day and kissed him back…