years in the chair what he did have was incredible upper body strength. He thrust with all of his might, feeling it hit bone and scrape off it as it sank deeper into her side. He twisted savagely, opening her up. She screamed. The sound was cut brutally short. Her body twitched on the end of the blade, then stopped moving completely. For a long second she stood, held up only by the sword in her side and the strength of the old man’s arm.
He heard a single shot but didn’t feel anything.
A fountain of blood sprayed across his face and more poured down the blade and down his arm. Then gravity caught up with her corpse and pulled the woman down the length of the sword. He couldn’t hold her dead weight. She carried on falling, landing awkwardly across his body and pinning him to the rug. He struggled, but he couldn’t shift her.
He heard the floorboard creek beneath cautious footsteps.
A moment later the old man saw Frost looking down over her shoulder.
“You took your sweet time,” he said. “Is Maxwell…?”
Frost didn’t say anything. Instead he hauled the dead assassin off the old man and dumped her on his bed. He pulled the sword from her side and dumped it on the bed beside her, then he peeled off her balaclava and grunted. It was a grunt of recognition. Next he righted the old man’s chair and helped him up into it. All of this was done in silence.
The old man sat there soaked in his erstwhile killer’s blood.
He looked at her lying there on the bed. There was no way anyone could confusher death for sleep. She really was beautiful, or had been. He wondered what could have turned her into a gun for hire, but then realized the stupidity of that kind of thinking. It was like wondering what turned Frost into the man he was, a life of conflict in Derry and Belfast or the fields of blood in Kosovo, or something else entirely, something coded on a genetic level.
“Lethe?” Sir Charles said, finally.
“As far as I can tell, she came alone, met Max at the door, then came looking for you. If Jude’s got any common sense, he turned the basement into a panic room and is sitting down there waiting for the cavalry.” He didn’t voice the alternative-that Lethe had tried to be the cavalry himself and was lying somewhere inside the big old house with a bullet in his head. The second alternative explained why the phone rang off the hook when he called, the first didn’t.
The old man wheeled his chair toward the doorway, then stopped, looking back toward the bed. “I will need fresh sheets,” and in that horrible second where reality comes rushing in, he realized that without Maxwell no one was going to be changing his bed linen and that his world had just become a little smaller without his companion in it. He shook his head, clearing it. “All right, first things first,” he said, all business. “What are we going to do with her?”
“I suggest we find a big mailing pouch and send her right back where she came from,” Frost said.
“Appealing as that notion is, I was thinking something a little less problematic. One option would be burying her in the grounds. I doubt very much anyone save Devere knows she is here, and he’s hardly likely to draw attention to his role in this. So given the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make like we never saw her. Another alternative is the incinerator.”
“That works as well,” Frost said, “but I’d still rather post her.”
“I am sure you would, sealed with a kiss, no doubt.”
“A line of C4 and a short fuse seems more fitting,” Frost said. “Okay, better get this over with. Let’s go find Lethe.”
As it was, they didn’t need to go far. Jude Lethe stood beside half of the butler’s corpse looking down at it. He heard them approach and looked up. “The cameras,” he said, as though that explained everything. It did in a way. The old man took it to mean he had seen the assassin shoot Maxwell on one of his many screens down there in the basement and he’d locked down the nerve center of Nonesuch. No second thoughts, no heroice’d followed the protocols to the letter, even if it meant leaving the old man in harm’s reach. Sir Charles nodded.
He looked down at his friend.
“Mister Lethe, would you be so kind as to reset the shield doors. Frost, Maxwell was one of ours. I would count it a personal favor if you would take care of things.”
Frost nodded. He seemed about to say something. It was rare that Ronan Frost didn’t simply speak his mind.
“What is it?” the old man asked.
“I saw the screens in the control room,” he licked his lips. “Konstantin, Orla. They’re ours too. And has Noah checked in? This is a mess.” The understatement of the year.
“There’s nothing to be done,” the old man said. It sounded harsh in his own ears even as he said it. Frost didn’t so much as flinch. He accepted the judgment like the professional soldier he was.
“I’m not finished looking,” Lethe said. “I found someone in the crowd who was filming the Pope’s blessing on his cell phone. The angle’s right, with a bit of luck he caught everything on film. The only problem is I’ve got no idea who he is and have only actually seen the back of his head.”
“That’s a bit of a problem,” Frost said, but the possibility that someone had caught the truth of the assassination on their cell phone seemed to energize him. “But it’s not insurmountable. Koblenz is a small enough city. Get the plod to go door to door with a photograph of the back of the guy’s head. You know the deal: Is this you? Is this you? Is this you? It has to be someone.”
There was nothing to say that that particular someone even came from Koblenz, but it was a straw worth clutching at. He could see that in Frost’s face. No man left behind.
“The police won’t go door to door. They took thousands of statements at the scene. If he had seen anything, the BKA will already know, and most likely, if they know he was filming, they will have confiscated his cell phone as potential evidence.”
“They might not have looked at the film yet,” Frost said.
“Or they might have seen it and deleted it already,” Sir Charles said. He knew all too well how some of these profile investigations went. They had evidence, witnesses, and a prime suspect that the British Government would already have disowned. A Russian defector with paramilitary experience? They couldn’t have asked for a better assassin. They wouldn’t be looking for the knife in the hands of the supposedly most loyal guardsmen in the world. It didn’t sit with their investigative mindset, and why would it? They all saw Konstantin do it. Or at least thought they did.
“It’s worth a try. It has to be,” Frost pushed. “What about the guardsmen themselves?” He looked at Lethe. “Any of them see what happened?”
“If they did, I’d expect another corpse to turn up any minute now, wouldn’t you?” Lethe asked.
Frost nodded. “But will another dead body be enough to barter Koni’s freedom?” Frost and the old man locked gazes. Sir Charles was the first to look away. “I want to go out there,” Frost said. “I’m no use sitting on my hands here. Hell, if it comes right down to it, Noah and I can go in there and bust him out of that damned German prison cell. It’d only need the two of us to bring him home. Then the three of us can go get Orla.”
He made it sound so simple.
It wasn’t.
It was a geopolitical minefield.
The suits at Vauxhall Cross might deny Konstantin, but that didn’t mean the Germans would necessarily believe their denials. It came down to whether they believed he was British or Russian, which side he was currently working for and which government they wanted to hang out to dry. Deals could be made, perhaps. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that the public needed to see someone suffer.
“That won’t be necessary,” Sir Charles told him. “You take care of Maxwell, I will make the call. If there is anything that can be done, it will be done. But I am making no promises. Understood?”
“This is becoming rather a bad habit, Charles,” Control’s reedy voice said over the telephone. “I don’t suppose I need to remind you about the hour, or point out that civilized people are abed?”
“I’m not going to apologize,” the old man said. “You know what is happening. Those are my people out there.”
“And that’s a damned shame, but there’s nothing I can do about it. And even if there was, these midnight calls are hardly endearing, old boy.”
