Tess had never known. Miranda was pleased, because her fiancée had been a good person and would never have understood.
Assembling the weapon without conscious thought, Miranda spent those few seconds drifting back to the explosion’s aftermath. She had become a machine focused on information, accessing countless police, MI5 and Anti-Terrorist Squad transmissions. She’d even hacked into a series of electronic COBRA meeting minutes, gleaning as much information as she could about the perpetrators as quickly as possible.
Grief had driven her on. Revenge had burned bright, fueling her, feeding her. Never once had she allowed herself time to pause and breathe. To do that would be to crumple. Perhaps when this was done she would allow herself that brief loss of control.
But probably not.
With the rifle assembled, Miranda crawled across the filthy rooftop to the parapet. She’d planned and memorized the route to minimize any chance of being seen from surrounding buildings. There were only a few buildings higher in this neighborhood, and most of them were far enough away to lessen the angle of sight.
The time was close. Lying behind the rooftop parapet, she stared up into a clear blue sky and felt the sun on her skin. Tess had loved the sun. She could spend hours sitting in sunlight, reading, listening to music, or simply relaxing, letting her thoughts fly. Miranda was the opposite. Her mind was always working, even though often she did not betray that externally. For her, relaxing was akin to letting down her guard.
“You’ll be able to relax soon,” she whispered, not entirely certain if she was speaking to herself or to Tess.
Down in the street, she heard the bustle of tourists and the peeping of moped horns. She would soon silence that street. The gunshots would be loud, reverberating between the buildings. The sight of the big man falling, his brains splashed across the window of the café where he went for lunch, would stun everyone silent.
When the screaming and chaos began, Miranda would make her escape.
Anger seethed within her, eager for the kill. “You see?” the tall man with nine fingers had said to her. “There? And there?” He’d shown her photographs of Ledger at the hospital the day before the explosion. Documents. Mobile phone data. Every shred of evidence had confirmed his assertion that Ledger was responsible for the explosion.
She’d asked the nine-fingered man what his motive was in revealing this to her.
“My nephew was in that hospital. I know the kind of man Ledger is, and I can’t do it myself.”
It seemed the man had known the kind of woman she was, too.
As she waited to kill the man who’d murdered her beloved, it was the moment of Tess’s death that played over and over in Miranda’s mind. The terror she must have felt. The shock. The awful realization when the building collapsed around and onto her, and the pressure, the pressure, the unrelenting crushing pressure as…
Miranda had seen enough people die to know what her fiancée must have looked like when they scooped her up.
She glanced at her watch. She was expert enough to not shift position, however uncomfortable she became. Any movement could give her away. The drainage hole afforded a good view down along the street, and she’d already run through events the previous evening. Now, all she had to do was wait.
The rifle lay propped before her, barrel contained within the hole’s shadow, nothing protruding beyond. She viewed along its sights. This was close-in work, no scope required. She could put a hole in a tin can at two hundred yards, and this would be less than fifty.
“Come on, you bastard,” she muttered, berating herself for talking. But no one would hear her up here, other than the pigeons that cooed and shit around her. Even they’d become used to her. One had even pecked at the grip on her right boot.
The lunch crowds passed by below. A few people stepped into and out of the café, but none of them was Ledger. She looked at her watch again. It was past 1:00 PM, usually he’d have been and gone by now.
Miranda breathed deeply and calmed herself. Tess smiled in her memory.
“Come on. Come on.” The whispers were little more than breaths, and when she heard another breathlike sound behind her, for a second she thought it was a pigeon flapping its wings.
A second was all he needed.
“Nice and steady,” a voice said.
Miranda held her breath, hands squeezed around the rifle. She could roll, bring the weapon up out of the drainage hole, finger squeezing as it came, and fire.
“I’ve got about three pounds of pressure on a four-pound grip,” he said. “Don’t even think about it. Drop the rifle. Crawl back on your belly.”
For a crazy second Miranda thought about making her move, but then she came to her senses. His voice was so assured and in control. And she hadn’t even heard the pigeons move.
No one was that quiet and smooth.
She let go of the rifle and pushed herself back, just a little.
“Now roll over and sit up, hands where I can see them.”
As she rolled and sat, several pigeons fluttered and took flight as if only just surprised. Ledger crouched ten feet across the rooftop. The access door was still closed behind him. She saw scuffs on his knees and the toes of his boots, a smear of dirt on his left elbow. He’d climbed the fucking wall.
He held a pistol in one hand, the other hand cupping the grip. He was a big man, hard, but he exuded grace and control.
“Now then, we’re going to—”
“I’m going to kill you,” Miranda said, surprising herself with the venom in her voice. It must have surprised him, too, just for a second — his eyes went slightly wider, his head lifted a little.
“Not any more,” he said. “Maybe if I hadn’t seen you following me two days ago. Maybe if you hadn’t given yourself away like the amateur you are.”
“So shoot me if you think I’m an amateur.”
“I don’t go around killing people for no reason.”
“Bullshit.”
Ledger shrugged slightly, never taking his eyes from her. “I’ve taken pieces off the board, sure, but there’s always been a reason. So don’t give me one.”
“I’ll give you hundreds, but only one of them matters to me. Royal London Hospital. You killed the woman I love.” She pressed her lips tight, trying not to betray her frustration. She shouldn’t be talking with him. Making this feel personal might strip away her edge, and until now she’d kept the grief and burning need for revenge buried under a veil of professionalism. She couldn’t let that change.
She had to make her move.
“I got the bastards who did that,” he said, and she could hear the uncertainty. Fear at being found out, no doubt.
“I’ve seen enough evidence to nail you to the cross, Ledger. I’m here to do just that.”
She sensed his confusion. His eyes flickered past her to the rifle she’d left lying beside the parapet. That was all she needed.
Miranda flowed. Every shred of her power, every ounce of grace, went into rolling to her right and powering toward Ledger. He fired his gun and the bullet whispered past her ear and over her back, so close that her clothing flicked and her belt tugged. Then she was on him, one hand batting his gun hand aside, the other driving up into his chin in a palm slap that cracked his teeth together.
She drove one foot between his and turned, still grasping his right arm at the wrist, tripping him and using his own weight to drop him to the rooftop. She went with him, drawing up her knee to land on his balls with all her weight.
He switched to the side, grunting as her knee crushed into his thigh.
Miranda head-butted him in the nose. She felt a warm splash of blood. Driving a fist into his left ear, hard, she rolled to her left.