‘This is your last chance, Fox,’ she told him, trying to keep her voice even. ‘Talk to me now, and we might be able to salvage something.’
The cops slowed as they drew closer. They were only just outside the helicopter’s glare now, all of them pointing their weapons at Fox.
‘Armed police, drop your gun!’ shouted one, working hard to make himself heard above the din.
But Fox’s expression was utterly defiant. ‘Unless you back off I will shoot her.’ His finger tightened on the trigger, and he didn’t take his eyes off Tina.
At that moment they were absolutely stone cold, and she realized he didn’t give a toss that he also had guns, including hers, pointed at him. Was perhaps even willing her to use the Glock.
‘You have five seconds,’ Fox shouted. ‘Pull back and lower your weapons, or I’ll kill her.’
No one in the line of police moved.
Tina swallowed. The barrel of Fox’s gun was barely two yards away from her. This was a ruthless and desperate man with nothing left to lose. A man who would rather go out in dramatic fashion than spend the rest of his life rotting in a prison, and in the end, who could blame him? In the same position, she too would prefer a quick death. An end to everything. But right now, Fox could just as easily shoot her, and get his quick death from the police bullets that would inevitably follow.
‘Five!’ he shouted, a terrifying decisiveness in his voice. ‘Four!’
Tina knew the police wouldn’t want to fire on him while he wasn’t aiming his gun at any of them. It was too risky, leaving them potentially open to manslaughter charges. And there was no guarantee that his gun wouldn’t discharge anyway, wounding or even killing her.
‘Three!’
A picture formed in Tina’s mind of the officers lying dead and dying on the road where she’d left them, their blood pouring all over the concrete. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to be like them. She wanted to travel. To meet someone. To have children. Suddenly, in a huge flurry she wanted all those things, and standing there, surrounded by colleagues, but utterly alone, she knew she risked losing it all. And in the next few seconds.
‘Two!’
Fox was staring right at her now, a maniacal energy in his eyes.
She knew he was going to pull the trigger.
‘One!’
And then the shot rang out, echoing through the cold night air.
Seventy-nine
21.39
For a few seconds, Tina didn’t even breathe. Then, slowly, she exhaled and lowered the gun as the armed officers raced over to her. She made no move to resist as the Glock was carefully removed from her fingers. Instead she stared down at the man she’d just shot.
Fox lay on his back, convulsing and gasping for air, his hands down by his side, his eyes wide with shock. His gun had dropped from his hand and was now out of reach — not that he was in any position to use it. She’d shot him once, in the chest, and already his movements were beginning to slow as his heart stopped working.
A group of officers approached him carefully, pointing their MP5s down at his torso, but none made any move to help him. Only when his eyes closed and he stopped moving altogether did someone shout for medical help, but by that point Tina was already walking away from the scene, almost in a daze, her heart hammering in her chest, as she tried to come to terms with what had happened.
One of the officers walked with her. Putting an arm round her shoulders, he asked if she was OK. She wasn’t. She was shell-shocked. She’d seen too much in one day — more than her mind could quite take in. But she shrugged off his arm and told him she was OK, and he didn’t try to stop her, even though she was going to have to make a statement.
More people were coming up the incline now, a long, straggling line of police officers, the majority of them armed, and ambulance crew. They were hurrying, some glancing across as they passed, but no one saying anything. Whether they knew who she was or not, it seemed as though they all wanted to give her a wide berth. Blue lights flashed through the trees in a wide and ever-growing arc as the emergency services continued to arrive in large numbers — but too late, as so often, to prevent the bloodbath.
Tina sighed. She’d been played. They all had. She’d fallen for Fox’s lies. She’d believed that he was genuinely going to cooperate. So, it seemed, had a lot of other people, including members of the government, who’d authorized his move to a safehouse. No one had believed that the individuals they were dealing with would have dared launch such an audacious rescue attempt. But perhaps they should have done. Audacious attacks seemed to be these people’s forte. Jesus, they’d even attacked the Shard.
But ultimately they’d failed. London had been shaken, but it was still there, just as it had been when the attacks had started this morning; and the perpetrators hadn’t been able to achieve their goal of making it look like the work of homegrown Islamic extremists, further diminishing the effect of their bombs.
Fox, too, had got the fate he deserved. Tina found it hard to believe that she’d been the one who’d killed him. She’d killed before, more than once. Two of those killings had been legal and were out in the public domain. One wasn’t, and never would be. But the shock of ending a life always hit her like a hard, physical blow, especially when it was done at close quarters. She wasn’t a soldier. She hadn’t been trained to kill. She was just a copper, for Christ’s sake, although after tonight, she wasn’t sure for how much longer.
Still, she was too tired to worry about that now. Reaching into her jacket with shaking hands, she pulled out a cigarette and lit it, savouring the hit as the smoke flew down her throat and into her lungs.
Before she called it a day, though, she needed to do one more thing.
Eighty
21.50
After he’d broken the boy’s neck, Voorhess allowed himself a well-deserved sigh of relief.
Given the numbers of police who’d been trying to catch him, he’d been extremely lucky to have made it this far, but Voorhess was a firm believer in the maxim that ultimately you made your own luck. He’d remained calm when others would have panicked, had adapted his plan to suit the rapidly changing circumstances, and even though he’d been betrayed, he’d outrun his pursuers and beaten their roadblocks.
On the seat next to him, the boy sat facing Voorhess, his neck tilted at an awkward angle. Voorhess pulled the boy’s baseball cap down over his face so that he didn’t have to look at him. The boy had told him that he was eighteen, and Voorhess felt a pique of sadness that he’d had to kill him. At least it had been quick. As the boy had pulled into the parking space, Voorhess had reached over, slipped an arm round his neck, like they were old rugby buddies, and done it one swift movement, so that the boy hadn’t had to suffer. Eighteen was a very young age to die, just when you were on the cusp of adulthood, with a whole bright world of adventure about to open up. But it didn’t look as if this boy — with his bad skin, his poor looks and his terrible taste in music — appreciated life in the way he should have done, and as a result, in Voorhess’s mind, his death was less tragic than it might otherwise have been.
He got out of the car, closing the door gently behind him, and stretched. It had been an uncomfortable as well as nerve-racking journey here, and his back was aching. Rolling his shoulders, and keeping his head down, he looked around. He was on the fourth floor of the short-stay car park at Heathrow’s Terminal 4, parked in a dark corner, and at this time of night it was mostly empty. Surprisingly, he could still hear the sounds of the occasional plane taking off and coming in to land, which meant that despite his missile attack, flights were still going in and out of Heathrow.
A lift bleeped, and Voorhess stepped into the shadows as a couple walked out pushing a luggage trolley. He waited until they’d got in their car and pulled away before transferring the boy from the driver’s seat to the car’s
