And then, before Blackburn could react, she swung the AK upward so that its bore was fixed directly upon his heart.
“Over for me,” she said. “Over for both of us.”
His mouth dry of spit, the blood thundering in his ears, Blackburn kept his gun trained on the woman even as she kept her weapon on him, watching her hand for the slightest twitch, hoping to God he’d be fast enough to anticipate her next move. His concentration shrank to a narrow tunnel that encompassed his hand, Gilea, and nothing else.
A moment of slow time passed. Another. Neither of them budged. Neither weapon was lowered. The air around Blackburn felt like gelatin infused with current.
He was unaware of the sudden movement behind him until it was too late. It all seemed to happen with lightning rapidity — the oiled click of a firing mechanism near his ear, the loud crack of the gun discharging behind him, the surprised, almost quizzical expression on Gilea’s face just before the bullet struck her forehead, producing a perfectly round dot of red above the ridge of her nose. Blackburn saw the machine gun jerk in her hand, and for a heartstopping instant was sure her finger would spasmodically lock around the trigger, sure he would be blown off his feet.
But the weapon slipped from her grasp without firing a round, and then her eyes rolled up in their sockets and her legs gave out and she slid loosely to the floor, trailing blood, brains, and skull fragments down the wall as she crumpled.
Blackburn lowered his pistol, turned his head on muscles that felt much too tight.
Starinov was standing directly behind him, having shoved through the Sword operatives that had converged around him. Smoke curled from the barrel of his outthrust.22.
His eyes met Blackburn’s. Held them.
“It is better like this,” he said.
Blackburn swallowed dryly but said nothing. The smell of cordite stung his nostrils.
“Your people saved my life, I saved yours.” Starinov brought down his gun. “Now perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me where you have come from.”
Blackburn was silent another moment. He looked past Starinov at the members of his team, men who had assembled from every corner of the globe to do a job that was both thankless and immeasurably dangerous. Thought about Ibrahim and his desert riders in Turkey, and Nimec’s operatives in New York, and the diverse, ordinary people who had done what they could to help along the way.
How was he to answer?
He considered it another few seconds, and finally just shrugged.
“We’re kind of from everywhere, sir,” he said.
FORTY-SEVEN
The setting sun had tinted the scattered clouds in the sky over Jamaica Bay glorious shades of scarlet and gold. The skyline of Manhattan was silhouetted in the distance against the sunset. Lights were going on all over in the city that never sleeps, and New York was beginning to take on its nighttime fairy-tale glow. But Roger Gordian stood alone at the end of a runway, oblivious to the beauty spread out before him.
He was about to bring his people home.
The pain, and the sense of terrible responsibility he felt, threatened to bring him to his knees.
As he stood there waiting, he cast his mind back over the events of the last few months. Was there anything, he wondered, that he could have done differently, that would have forestalled this moment? Anything that he or his people could have changed that would have brought these people home alive instead of in boxes? That would have brought their families together to celebrate instead of to mourn?
If there was, he couldn’t think of it now. Hindsight was usually all it was cracked up to be, but even in retrospect, he couldn’t think of a moment he’d wasted, a shred of information he hadn’t acted upon as soon as it had been verified.
Tragedy had come upon them all as silently as a mist in the night. It had drifted into their midst, burst upon them completely without warning. Set into motion half a world away by a handful of opportunists driven by greed and ambition and completely unrestrained by conscience or morality, it was too late to stop it, any of it, from the moment it had been conceived.
And the costs, God, the costs…
Gordian ran a hand over his eyes.
Times Square had only been the beginning. Over a thousand people dead, many thousands more injured. All the families and friends who would never again share the simple pleasures of life with people they loved. The survivors who would never again be able to enjoy a day without pain, who were left broken in mind and body to pick up the pieces of their lives and go on as best they could. All because they had wanted to celebrate the glorious beginning of a new millennium.
Roger Gordian knew from hard personal experience just how high that price was.
But those people, as much as he mourned their passing and grieved for their losses, hadn’t been his. He had been diminished by their loss, but not directly responsible for their deaths. He had not personally sent them into harm’s way.
More than twenty people, working at his behest in places he had sent them to, were coming home in coffins. From his ground station in Russia. From Cappadocia in Turkey.
He knew most of them by name, some of them well. A few were among the small circle of people he counted as his dearest friends.
He’d sent them out to die.
He would never take a waking breath again without thinking of them.
He would never forgive himself.
And what had it all been about?
Politics.
Miserable, stinking, corrupt politics.
His people had died because some power-crazed demagogue had wanted to throw an election.
It made him physically ill, nauseous.
Every single one of his employees had been, each in his own way, a good person. Pedachenko wasn’t worthy to be in the same room with them. But with his grandiose plans of conquest, he had killed them all.
Oh, God, the pain…
Stop, it, Gordian, he told himself. Take a deep breath. Take a step back from that endless cycle of guilt and recrimination. It doesn’t change the past, and you know where it leads you.
Right.
So where did that leave him?
With the present…
Russia was stable for the moment. Starinov had used the furor over Pedachenko’s actions to consolidate his government. Aid was flowing into Russia from the U.S.A. and Europe. The threat of a famine which would kill millions of innocent men, women, and children had been averted for now.
Was it worth Arthur and Elaine Steiner’s deaths?
No. Nothing was worth that.
But nothing could change what had happened, either.
Roger Gordian, mover and shaker among the world’s power elite, was powerless to alter the past, even a single second of it. He was just a lonely man with a guilty conscience, standing and waiting for a chartered plane to land, a plane full of the dead he would never be able to expunge from his conscience.
It hurt. God, it hurt.
What could he do about it?
How could he go on from here?
He searched the heavens for an answer.
For the first time he noticed the beauty of the sunset, now in its fullest glory. It was stunning. For a second he just emptied his mind and let himself bask in the beauty of it. It was, he realized, the first time he’d really looked at something and allowed himself to open his emotions to the experience since the Times Square bombing.
The world was still out there in all its imperfect beauty. It was still turning on its axis, and it would continue to do so, no matter what the humans — good, evil, or indifferent — who crawled on its surface did.