Adam made his way into the back side of Kensington Gardens. It was Sunday morning but the park was full. Joggers, strollers, and Rollerbladers were airily whirling by in every direction. It was a clear day; the sun was just high enough to take the chill off, but not yet bright enough to share much warmth. He walked by himself, a cap over his shaved head and sunglasses on his face, his pistol tucked quietly into his back belt under his T-shirt. He had been out there for a couple of hours now, first in front of the house, getting a better sense of the security shack, then there in the back, getting a read on the movement in the park behind the mansion. His guess was that the house was staffed pretty heavily, even though it was a Sunday morning. He counted at least five men. Now he was here, once again making his way to the back, just below the large, leafy wall that separated the rear lawn at Heaton’s estate from the Kensington Gardens section of Hyde Park.
He crossed the public gardens, over the small footpath, waited until there was no one in view, and then, with as much speed as he could muster, made a go at scaling the wall. The wounds on his legs weren’t helping. He was climbing vines and using a small trim pipe to grab on to while trying to ignore the searing pain from the bite wounds on his legs. It took longer than he thought to scale the ten-foot wall, and he was sure one of the park patrons had seen him, but there was no going back. He thought to himself how much better this would have been at night, his original plan, but Early’s boss had sped up the schedule on him.
He had made a promise to Jack that he’d be there for him and he would, but, more important, he liked the idea of having Heaton and Georgia in one place together, of confronting them both at once. He made it over the top and threw himself to the yard below, into the back of Heaton’s property. He hit the ground in an awkward slant, his foot having gotten slightly wrapped in a vine on the way down.
The force of the fall knocked the wind right out of him. As he slowly pulled himself to his feet, two security men ran across the manicured yard, speeding toward him. They were coming on at full tilt. Adam woozily stood, raised his hands, and spoke in a fake drunken slur, which was not hard to imitate considering how rattled he was from the tumble he’d taken.
“Whoa, whoa, it’s cool … it’s cool. I was just trying to impress my girlfriend that I could climb the wall and fell over. I’ll go back, dudes, I’m sorry.… Not looking for trouble.” The two security men, both in cheap business suits, slowed down to listen. Adam recognized one of them. He was the shooter from up in the woods at Dorrington, the one who had murdered the young police officer with the long-range rifle. Whether they believed his drunken park-goer story or not, they both had sized him up as less of a threat, more of a nuisance. They came on him as a unit and drew close as one of them punched Adam square in the face. The other answered with a sharp kick to the midsection. One of them even laughed. They both came back in for more. Adam stood once again, doing his best not to lose consciousness. They grabbed him and were about to take the beating to a new level, both truly seeming to be enjoying the task at hand.
Neither of them saw the pistol come out. The initial shot was their first inkling of how much trouble they were in. The first bullet tore into the taller one’s leg from an inch away. Adam was sure the man’s femur had shattered into pieces. The second bullet pierced the second guard’s hip straight on. He purposefully held the muzzle right against his body so as to dampen the sound as much as possible. Both men collapsed to the ground, rolling in pain. He saw a set of plastic restraints on one of their belts. He took it, and after a small struggle that got the Dorrington shooter pistol-whipped across the head, he managed to link them together, fastening them to the piping along the back wall. He took their radios, shattered them against the brick, then took their guns and headed up the back lawn.
He crept up the side of the lushly landscaped mansion and waited for other security staffers to follow or an alarm to go off. It didn’t happen. He moved tenuously along the west wall, peeking his head carefully into each window, doing his best to be mindful of the security cameras. Finally, as he peered into the fourth window, a den on the first floor, he saw Georgia Turnbull on the couch watching a large television on the far wall. The volume was up loud enough so that Adam could hear it through the window, loud enough so that there was no way he would be able to hear what anyone in the room was saying.
Jack Early wasn’t in the room. Neither was Heaton. He wanted to know that Jack was safe. He had played along well, Jack, and Adam had come to like his son, even to like Jack a bit. He pulled back slowly, needed time to figure out how best to make an entrance and confront both Heaton and Georgia with his digital file of Georgia’s confession, how to start the process of forcing them to clear his name and face the police, the press, and the public for what they had done. He needed to find out where Jack was. He was inside that house someplace and Adam was pretty sure he wasn’t having tea and cookies. If he were Heaton, the first thing he would do, he thought, was to shut Jack up in a permanent fashion. This poor pompous rich prick had a lot to lose.
He pulled back, not sure what to do. It might be best to wait and get a better sense of the situation, to figure out which of the big double doors would be the best way into the house.
He tucked into the safety of a large row of bushes, still trying to keep himself from being viewed on any of the security cameras. He had an idea that the two guards he had just shot had simply spotted him and weren’t sent from the security shack. If they had been, more help would be coming, and none was.
There was a vine-covered latticework running from the ground floor to a second-story patio outside one of the upstairs rooms. Adam hated the idea of doing any more climbing, of wrenching open his barely healed wounds any further, but he needed to get into that house. He sucked it up and started to pull himself to the second story. He made it halfway up when his wounds demanded that he stop. His legs were on fire. He needed a short break from the pain.
Two more security guards ran into the backyard, right as he stopped climbing. They ran right beneath him and toward their cohorts at the back wall. He tried to stay silent but the latticework rung he was standing on cracked, sending him sliding down to the next one. The noise alerted the two sentries. They stopped in their tracks, turned, and saw him hanging there, blatantly exposed. The first guard bolted up to the back of the house and practically flew as he scrambled up the latticework behind Adam, grabbing him by the jacket and tossing him backward onto the grass. The guard turned around and dove down twenty feet, landing on him as the other guard grabbed Adam by the scruff of his hair and began punching him in the back in the neck.
Adam did everything he could to protect his face, his privates, and his stomach. These two punch-happy creeps were obviously cut from the same cloth as their buddies. They seemed to have been waiting for the opportunity to beat on someone like this. They reminded Adam of the dogs at Dorrington.
Sadly for them, right in the middle of their cavalcade of cheap shots, Adam pulled a knife from its sheaf on his belt. It came out fully formed and ready. He didn’t even take the time to blink. He rammed it straight up into the center of the first man’s chest, just off to his left side, twisted it good, twice, then pulled it out and delivered an even better lunge into the second man’s neck and straight across: quick, fast, and deep, and ended it. There was no other way. One would be dead in seconds; the other would maybe have another minute to live.
Adam rose to his feet. He was covered in blood, most of it theirs, some of it his. He caught his breath as the two men on the grass groaned in agony, bled out, and died. He looked around and thought about the men at the back wall. The one whose femur Adam had shot out would most likely bleed out, too. He tried not to think too hard about any of it. They all had it coming, every last one of them.
An alarm rang out: a loud, piercing scream of electronic panic. It was raucous and earsplitting, the loudest goddamn alarm he’d ever heard. The siren was followed by a hail of gunfire coming from the front of the house. Something was going very badly in the front of the mansion. Something that for once had nothing to do with Adam.