Monday, 21 December 2015
6:29 P.M.
“Come on. Come on,” Baxter uttered under her breath as the LED numbers ascended toward their destination.
Rouche had already unholstered his service weapon, but doubted that this latest Puppet could have smuggled anything illicit through the airport-style security check on the ground floor.
31 . . . 32 . . . 33 . . . 34 . . .
The lift slowed to a gentle stop.
“Ready?” asked Rouche.
The doors parted; music and the soft hum of sophisticated conversation greeted them. They shared a pleasantly surprised shrug before Rouche quickly concealed his gun and they stepped into the cavernous space to join the smartly dressed queue waiting to be seated.
As moodily lit as the city sparkling in the background, the immense cage of steelwork was glowing pink, an enormous arch of glass and metal reaching fifteen meters overhead, greedily laying claim to a little more of the sky.
While they were waiting, they scanned the busy hall for anyone matching the description they’d been given, only to find that at least a third of the clientele were wearing dark suits and that a person’s brick shithouse–ness was a difficult thing to judge while seated.
A smartly attired man gestured for them to step forward. A not-so-subtle look down over Baxter’s practical winter outfit and then back up via Rouche’s crumpled suit ended in a condescending smile.
“Good evening. You have a reservation?” he asked skeptically.
Rouche flashed the man his identification.
Baxter leaned in close to speak quietly:
“Detective Chief Inspector Baxter. Don’t react!” she told him when he suddenly recognized her and looked around for a supervisor. “I need you to check your list. Do you have a reservation for an Isaac Johns?”
A brief pause; then the man ran his finger down his clipboard of names: “Johns . . . Johns . . . Johns . . .”
“Really think he’d use his real name?” Rouche asked her.
“He used his own credit card,” replied Baxter. “He’s got nothing to lose now. I don’t think he cares.”
“Johns! Found him!” the man exclaimed. Several people looked in their direction.
“Again,” said Baxter patiently, “don’t react.”
“Sorry.”
“Which table? Don’t turn round! Don’t point!”
“Sorry. Beside the window. Right-hand side. Closest to the doors, as he requested.”
Baxter held the man’s gaze as Rouche glanced across the room:
“Table’s empty.”
“Did you see what he looked like?” she asked the man.
“He was . . . tall . . . and big, as in muscular. He was wearing a black suit and tie . . . like he was going to a funeral.”
Baxter and Rouche shared a look.
“OK,” she told him. “I want you to carry on as normal. If you see him, I want you to walk over to us very, very slowly and whisper it in my ear. All right?”
He nodded.
“Start on the terrace?” she suggested to Rouche.
Unexpectedly, she linked arms with him. They walked through the bar under their camouflage of happy couple and out onto the terrace, the tip of the Shard sparkling white in the distance like a snow-capped mountain. As they strolled over to the metal railing, snowflakes blew around them from all directions before scattering over the twinkling metropolis below.
The only people braving the cold were a shivering couple toasting champagne glasses and some accommodating parents being led outside by their excited little girls. From the relative privacy of the dark terrace, the indoor space was lit in neon pink, allowing them to search the room of faces without attracting attention.
“Perhaps he went home,” said Rouche optimistically, but then he spotted their well-dressed assistant pacing around the room searching for them. “Or perhaps not.”
They hurried inside and then followed the man’s directions back past the lifts to the toilets. There, they were confronted with a row of identical cubicles, the shiny black doors promising a more pleasant setting than the last set they had occupied together.
Rouche took out his weapon: “I’ll go in. You keep watch.”
Baxter looked like she might hit him.
“We don’t know for sure he’s in there,” explained Rouche, glad he was armed. “Plus, there might be more than one of them. I need you watching my back.”
“Fine,” Baxter huffed, slumping against the wall to stay out of the path of the harassed waiters struggling to cope with the demands of simultaneous Christmas parties.
Rouche made his way down the narrow corridor of partitioned bathrooms to find the first two standing empty.
“Someone’s in here!” a woman’s voice called from the third when he tried the door.
“Sorry!” he shouted over the sound of a hand-dryer as the next door along unlocked.
Fingers wrapped around the handle of the weapon inside his jacket, he relaxed when an elderly gentleman wobbled out, giving him a rosy-cheeked smile.
Rouche passed one more vacant cubicle before reaching the final black door, propped closed despite clearly being unlocked. With his gun raised, he kicked the flimsy piece of wood open. The door swung back loudly into the side of the empty room.
Against the back wall stood the lid from the cistern; beside it, a rubber bag had been discarded, dripping water onto the floor. On the back of the door hung a large black suit jacket and tie. Rouche turned to leave, kicking something metallic across the floor. He walked over and picked up a brass nine-millimeter bullet.
“Shit,” he said to himself, rushing back out into the main room.
“He’s not in th—” Rouche started, colliding with an overladen waiter, who dropped his tray of precariously balanced glasses across the floor. “Sorry,” Rouche apologized, looking around for Baxter.
“Entirely my fault,” the young man responded politely, even though it entirely wasn’t.
“Did you see a woman waiting out here?”
Then came the sound of chair legs scraping across the floor as people abandoned their tables.
Rouche hurried toward the uproar and shoved his way through the crowd moving away from the glass windows.
He paused.
He could see Baxter out in the dark. She was standing by the railing as her hair blew wildly in the wind. A few meters from her, huddled in the corner beside the glass, the young family was cowering, the father crouching defensively in front of his two daughters.
Weapon first, Rouche slowly stepped outside.
Free from the glare of the lights reflecting in the glass, he finally understood the situation; there was one other person out on the terrace with them, behind Baxter.
A muscular arm was holding her still, a small pistol pushed up under her chin.
In the other hand, a second weapon was pointed at the family in the corner.
“Rouche, I presume,” said an unfittingly high-pitched voice from behind Baxter, only a sliver of a face visible behind his human shield.
He pronounced it correctly, meaning that Baxter had either given up his name or, more likely, she had called out to him.
“Mind putting that down?” asked the man pleasantly, pulling the hammer back on the gun beneath Baxter’s chin.
She gave a subtle shake of her head, but Rouche hesitantly lowered the weapon.
“Isaac Johns, I presume,” said Rouche, hoping that his calm tone was catching. “You all right, Baxter?”
“She’s fine,” Johns answered on her behalf.
“I leave you alone for one minute . . .” Rouche laughed, casually taking a step toward them.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” yelled Johns, dragging Baxter backward, losing Rouche the ground he’d just made up.
He was as imposing as his description had promised. Although Baxter’s slender frame was insubstantial cover for the man’s bulk, his vital organs, and therefore any hope of an instant kill, were safely out of sight.
“So what’s the plan, Isaac?” asked Rouche, keen to get Johns talking. He had already registered the difference between this man and the other killers: he appeared calm and in control. He was enjoying his moment in the limelight.
“Well, it was to get our audience to decide which of them”—he gestured toward the huddled family—“lives or dies. But then I spotted Detective Baxter here and simply couldn’t help myself. So that responsibility has, regrettably, fallen to you.”
The man was momentarily distracted by his indoor audience. Rouche slowly raised his gun a couple of inches, just in case an opportunity presented itself.
“No!” yelled Johns, careful to keep Baxter between them. “Tell those people if anyone leaves, I’ll start shooting. These people have the right idea: get your phones out. It’s OK. I want you to film this. I want the world to hear Rouche make his decision.”
Satisfied that enough cameras were about to capture his moment of triumph, Johns turned his attention back to Rouche.
“So which is it, Rouche? Who would you like me to kill, your colleague or a completely innocent family?”
Rouche looked anxiously at Baxter.
She gave him nothing.
With the barrel of the gun pressing into her chin, she couldn’t move at all, let alone create an opportunity for him to take a clean shot. He then looked over at the family, recognizing all too well the look of utter desperation on the father’s face.
There were shouts from inside as the first armed team arrived.
“Stop!” Rouche called back to them. “Don’t come any closer!”
When one of the officers failed to obey the order, Johns fired a warning shot, which ricocheted off the wall close to the younger girl’s head before cracking the glass barrier that separated them from the sky. The officers inside raised their hands and remained with the watching crowd.
In the quiet that followed, Rouche could hear the little girl’s teeth chattering. She was only five or six, freezing to death while Johns protracted the ordeal under a pretense of hope.
There was no choice to be made. This was no game. He intended to kill them all, and Baxter knew it too.
After all the theater, all the media-seducing horrors increasing in spectacle and ambition, there was still one simple, despicable act left in their arsenal, something worse than all the mutilated bodies put together—the public execution of an innocent child. They had already proven capable of it, having murdered the entire Bantham family behind closed doors. Rouche was confident that Johns wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.
The falling snow was hindering his vision. He was careful to keep his trigger finger moving before it could stiffen and slow in the cold.
“It’s decision time!” Johns shouted to his audience. “Speak up so that the world can hear you,” he instructed Rouche. “Who do you want to die? Answer or I’ll kill them all.”
Rouche remained silent.
Johns groaned in frustration: “OK . . . Have it your way. Five seconds!”
Rouche met Baxter’s eye. She had no way out.
“Four!”
He glanced at the family. The father was holding his hands over his younger daughter’s eyes.
“Three!”
Rouche sensed the room of camera phones at his back.
He needed more time.
“Two!”
“Rouche . . .” said Baxter.
He looked at her desperately.
“One!”
“. . . I trust you,” she told him, closing her eyes.
She heard Rouche move, the crack of a gunshot, the air whistling past her ear, the shattering glass, and the muffled impact all at once. She felt the pressure release beneath her chin, the restricting arm fall away . . . the presence behind her vanish.
When she opened her eyes again, Rouche looked shaken, still standing with the weapon pointed directly at her. She watched a bloodstained snowflake dance in the air between them before it plunged over the edge of the building to join the rest of the crime scene five hundred feet below.
Her temple began to throb from where the bullet had grazed her as their backup ran out to join them. The traumatized parents were sobbing inconsolably in relief and shock, in desperate need of some words of reassurance, just somebody to tell them out loud that they were safe.
Rouche slowly lowered his weapon.
Without uttering a word to any of them, Baxter headed back inside, swiping a bottle of wine from one of the vacated tables as she passed, before sitting at the deserted bar to pour herself a generous glass.