A man in clothes made filthy with soot and ash threw the door wide and strode for her and Stephen with a leer on his face. A younger man with a gaunt face and hungry yellow eyes came in behind and spoke a warning.
“It is the child. He said the child must not be harmed.”
A chill rose up Caroline’s neck like an icy fist encircling her throat.
She raised the LeMat and squeezed the trigger as her child’s father had shown her.
The slug struck the sooty man dead center in the chest. He barked a cough and collapsed, lifeless. The gaunt man’s ochre eyes opened wide as he backed for the door. He held up a hand in a gesture of surrender or pleading.
Caroline thumbed the hammer and squeezed again. Three of the gaunt man’s fingers vanished in a spray of bone and blood. The bullet continued on to take the man just above the eye. His body was lifted and thrown spinning against the doorframe. Bits of his skull and scalp stuck to the flocked wallpaper.
The baby screamed in the dying din as her hearing returned. Stephen was red-faced, his little chin furrowed and quivering with unreasoning fear. She renewed her grip on the infant, holding him tight to her side and held the smoking pistol trained on the empty doorway. Her aim and her arm were steady and unwavering.
“Mademoiselle Tauber? Or is it Rivard here?” came a cultured and maddeningly calm voice speaking impeccable French from somewhere out in the dark of the hallway.
“Speak English, motherfucker,” she snapped.
“We only want the child. I suppose you know why.”
Caroline remained silent. She would not engage this man on his level.
“He is very special. Very unique. A gift to science and mankind. You must appreciate that. You must know he would be treated as a treasure by—”
She squeezed the trigger and put a hole through the wall by the door where she supposed the speaker was standing on the other side.
“I see. A mother’s love, then,” the voice resumed after a moment. “I fully appreciate your position. You could come along if you wished. You could be the boy’s guardian. You could see that we mean him no harm.”
Another shot. This one farther left. It drilled through a cameo portrait hanging on the wall. She fired again, lower and to the left. A cry went up in the hallway and something heavy struck the floor hard enough to make the boards beneath her feet quake. More cries from without, and feet retreating down the stairs.
“Ah,” came the voice, still irritatingly serene and reasonable. “You have disposed of one of my hired men, with the added benefit of the rest fleeing.”
She said nothing. Stephen’s face was frozen in a silent shriek of terror. The voice from the hallway resumed.
“I suppose that is what comes of paying in advance, eh?” The voice had a patrician English accent with a touch of something foreign. He was baiting her into speaking. She would not rise to his taunts.
“You know who I come from. You know who sent me. The man is like a father to you. He would be the same to your son.”
“He’s a lying bastard,” she said, then slid to her right on bare feet. Dwayne always told her to shoot and move, shoot and move.
“Sir Neal wishes only to welcome you back, to share his confidences with you and the rewards of all your research. Your brother as well.”
She squeezed again. This time through the doorjamb, splitting it top to bottom.
The silence was long this time, and she watched over the smoking barrel of the revolver, quivering now under its weight and from the effort to hold her arm straight for such an extended time. The door swung slowly inward. A dark man with ivory hair stepped into the doorway holding Mme. Villeneuve in a chokehold before him. In his other hand was a handgun of flat back metal—a modern automatic of some kind. He held it easily, pointed from his hip at her midriff.
“Neither one of us can miss, Caroline,” he said with an easy smile, showing teeth that gleamed in the haze of gun smoke that hung in the air. The widow clutched at his arm in a feeble effort to release the grip that was asphyxiating her. Mme. Villeneuve’s face was turning crimson, her lips parted to draw in air that would not come. Caroline kept the pistol trained on the man, who continued speaking in measured tones.
“Spare the child any more of this. Think of what is best for Stephen’s interests,” he said, stepping into the room over the bodies of the two hired men. The toes of Mme. Villeneuve’s slippers brushed the floorboards in involuntary spasms.
She thumbed the hammer back and trained it once again on the stranger. She squeezed the trigger. Only a metallic click rewarded her effort.
The ivory-haired man dropped the widow choking and gasping to the floor. He reached out a hand to Caroline. His smile beamed wider even as his eyes turned to glittering black stones.
“And so we are done,” he said. She drew back the hammer again.
“Mademoiselle, please,” he said, the fixed smile collapsing a bit at the corners.
Her thumb pushed forward a lever recessed into the curve of the hammer and she applied steady pressure to the trigger.
At this close range, the buckshot from the underslung shotgun barrel had no air time to spread into a wider pattern. The buckshot took the man from the future like an iron fist traveling at ballistic velocity high in the chest and neck. He was flung from his feet and through the open doorway. A fountain of blood sprang from his torn gullet. His body struck the far wall and dropped in a heap to
