Ronan realized he didn’t have time to run. There was no way he’d make it out of the tunnel and back up onto the platform before the train slammed into his back. He knew what she’d done; she’d run for one of the service stairways.
He looked left and right. The entire tunnel lit up like midday by the onrushing headlights. He couldn’t see anywhere to hide. So much for that god, the thought flashed across his mind. Of all the “last things” he had expected to flood his final moments-beautiful women loved and lost, friends betrayed, lives taken and saved-cursing a make-believe deity hadn’t so much as registered as a possible farewell-to-the-flesh thought.
He thought about throwing himself down and lying flat on his stomach between the tracks and praying there wasn’t a trailing hook dangling from the train’s under-carriage to gut him like a fish and drag him all the way back to the city center.
The headlights were huge now, filling the tunnel. The tunnel itself wasn’t wide enough for him to press himself up against the wall. He looked down at the wheels, then at the tracks and at the curve of the wall, and realized it was his only chance. The horn blared again. Despite the shriek of the breaks the train wasn’t slowing anywhere near quickly enough to save his life. He had seconds to think.
Move.
One chance.
It all came down to the width of the tracks and the aerodynamics of the train itself. All he could do was pray there was an inch to spare.
Ronan Frost hurled himself sideways, hitting the ground hard, and wedged himself into the narrow gap between the iron rail and the concrete wall. He rolled over onto his right shoulder, face pressed right up against the cold concrete. He tried to stop breathing and meltt a trhe wall, making himself as thin as possible. The horn screeched in his ears, so close it could have been inside his head. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to flinch. The wind battered him up against the wall. Suddenly an incredible force tried to peel his head up into the train’s path.
Ronan gritted his teeth and pressed his face into the gravel. The vacuum caused by the displaced air and the train’s momentum tore at his hair. His screams were lost beneath the madness of the hellbound train. An agonized sob tore between his teeth. He resisted every impulse to throw his head back to relieve the pain, knowing that it all that was saving his life.
The duh-duh-de-duh duh-duh-de-duh of the wheels filled his head.
He couldn’t breathe.
The wind displaced by the train pummeled the Irishman up against the concrete wall, and he loved every damned second of that pain because it meant he was alive.
And then it was gone. The train had passed him, and he could breathe again. He lay there for a full thirty seconds, listening to the mad rise and fall of his own breathing, then pushed himself to his feet. He thought about going deeper into the tunnel, chasing the woman up the service stairwell to the surface, but she’d be long gone by the time he reached the top. Still, there was no way she could know he’d survived. In her place he would go back to the apartment to finish what he’d started. He had to assume she’d think like him.
Ronan Frost walked unsteadily toward the light.
He felt a warm, wet stickiness on his cheek and reached up to feel out the damage. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. There was more blood than he would have expected. The gravel had cut up the side of his face.
As he came out of the tunnel, the first of the next wave of commuters had begun to file onto the platform. A few of them looked at him curiously; the others adopted the Ostrich’s if-I-don’t-see-it-it-doesn’t-see-me attitude, deliberately not looking his way. That was what the city had become over the last few years. A decade ago a good Samaritan would have come to the end of the platform to help him up while someone else went for help. Today they watched him suspiciously as he climbed unsteadily back to the platform and walked toward them. He couldn’t blame them. He knew what he must have looked like, battered and bloody and, he realized, still holding the Browning in his right hand.
Ronan holstered the gun.
Walking back toward the entrance he hit the speed dial on the earpiece, but he’d lost the network down in the tunnel. He pushed his way through the barriers, ignoring the stares, and hit the speed dial again and again until Lethe answered: “Talk to me.”
“Lost her in the tunnels and nearly got myself flattened by the 8:30 to South Shields. All in all not the best result.”
“Oh, I’d say the nearly part was a home win. So, fill me in?”
“Female. Middle Eastern origin. Lebanese, if I was forced to guess-she had that look. Five eight with a punch like Tyson. Beautiful. And by that I don’t mean the kind of girl you want to take home to meet your mother; we’re talking life as a willing sex slave.”
“I’ll run her against Six’s active database. If she’s running out of the Middle East, odds are Intelligence has got something on her,” Lethe said in his ear. “Maybe they’ve got a ‘hot assassin’ search string set up.”
“She used one of the emergency service stairwells on the southbound rail, maybe fifty yards inside the tunnel. Can you pull up the schematics and see where she’ll have come out?” Ronan asked, ignoring him.
“Already on it, Frosty. Looking for live stream CCTV in the vicinity right now. If she came out that way, I’ll find her, have no fear.”
Ronan walked back toward the apartment on Acorn Road. As he had expected, the police had begun to gather outside the broken window of the hairdressing salon. He had to get back inside Fisher’s place, but he could hardly walk up to the front door looking the way he did; and the back alley was already crawling with cops.
A row of magpies sat on the guttering above the hairdresser’s. He counted them, doing the old rhyme in his head: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver.
He walked on two streets and stripped out of his leathers and stuffed them behind one of the dumpsters. He would collect them later. One of the bystanders was sure to remember the leather-clad biker who had come chasing the woman out of the broken window. They wouldn’t remember the gray-haired guy in the designer suit.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket, wadded it up and dabbed at his face, using it to soak up the worst of the blood, then dumped it in a trash can. He couldn’t exactly clean himself up properly, but he looked different enough to pass a cursory inspection.
It was all about the instantly recognizable details-that was the way the brain worked. It registered the leathers and more than likely demonized the man holding the gun. Witnesses were unreliable at the best of times. Out of the leathers and tidied up, none of them would identify him as the demon.
“Well,” he said to himself, “time to put the theory to the test.”
He walked back to the alley behind Fisher’s place.
There were two policemen standing guard at the hair-dressers gate.
He said hi as he walked past them. That was part of the trick, having the brass balls to look like you belonged there, no matter where there was. He had to keep his back turned away from them. The last thing he needed was one of them noticing the blood stains. The older of the two police lifted his radio and talked into it. He seemed to be taking a little too much interest in Ronan. He didn’t want him looking too closely.
Ronan kept his pace regular, resisting the temptation to walk faster. He willed the policeman to look away, but he didn’t. Just look like you belong, he said to himself. Keep it natural. You live here. They have no reason to think otherwise. Just walk up to the gate and open it. He was glad he’d taken the extra few seconds to open the green gate before. Now as he reached it, he thumbed down the latch, pushed it open and walked inside. It was a lot less suspicious than boosting himself up over the glass-topped wall.
Inside it took him less than two minutes to find what he’d been looking for.
Beside the computer in the study there was a photo of Fisher and his two girls, and tucked into the frame was one of those little photo-booth instant snaps. The woman in the smaller picture was unmistakably Catherine Meadows. She was cheek-to-cheek and laughing with Sebastian Fisher, and it was obvious in that one photograph that they were in love.
What could make a man burn himself ive? he asked himself, and this time he knew the answer, the only answer: to protect someone he loved.
Sebastian Fisher had loved three people. One of them had burned alive with him-a different place, but the
