Lyons slowly turned the handle. When no shots greeted him, he pushed open the door. It was a bathroom. Lyons entered and pushed aside the shower curtain. Nothing. The room was empty.
Blancanales and Carlton checked the door on the left. Pol pushed it open slightly. It slammed shut on him, bullets drilling through the white-painted wood. Splinters sprayed as Blancanales leaped back. Carlton groaned as if hit. Then he opened up with his Sterling, stitching a figure eight in the closed door.
Blancanales kicked open the door and dived in. His caution was unnecessary. On the floor beside him lay a moaning figure doubled up on the floor. The guy fought a losing battle to stuff entrails back inside a 9mm zipper across his stomach. The man stared at Blancanales, then his eyes glazed over and he fell silent.
The last door on the right was already partially open. Gadgets opened it the rest of the way. Silence met him, and he walked in unopposed. The room may have been a bedroom once, but it was a study now. Two filing cabinets stood along one wall, with a desk and chair in front of them. The place was meant for work and nothing else. It would have to be checked out thoroughly later.
Lyons stared at the remaining door. Suddenly he snapped a new magazine into place and pulled the trigger. A three-round burst at the lock blew the door open.
Carlton moved to one side. Blancanales to the other. Gadgets rolled into the room. He was nearly cut apart by a stream of submachine-gun bullets.
The bullets tracked across the floor, trying to find the rolling figure.
Lyons stepped through the door and gave the M-10 its head.
Silence descended on the room as the dust settled. They were in the upstairs master suite. Gadgets sheltered behind a divan. Lyons had thrown himself behind a tub chair.
Off to the left was the open door to the dressing room where the submachine-gun fire had come from. Signaling Blancanales and Carlton, Lyons covered the door as the two men stepped into the master suite and moved toward the dressing room.
Blancanales looked into the small room and saw flapping curtains. He checked it out. A fire escape.
He cursed.
17
Noisy chaos greeted the four men as they left the building. Police were everywhere, trying to control the curiosity seekers who had gathered at the sound of gunfire. Some of Carlton's men were helping the bobbies keep the crowd away.
Able Team stepped back as three of Carlton's men moved past them with a curt nod. The Americans recognized some of them as they headed up to secure the apartment from intruders.
Lyons paced away from the crowd with Carlton. "Where the hell do we look?" he said.
"We look in the alley that leads to Paddington Station, that's where," Carlton grinned. A glint of triumph showed in his eyes. The nearby railway station was the ideal bait for their prey.
Lyons waved to his partners. The three men jogged after the English soldier who knew the mean streets and alleyways of London like a coroner knows the arteries of a corpse.
They turned sharp right at the end of the street into an alley connecting with the wider pedestrian alleyway that ran behind the row of houses. In the main alleyway, about a hundred yards to the left of them, the pursuers saw the small, unmistakable figure of Lady Carole Essex. Unmistakable because she walked briskly, as if to avoid attention.
The pounding of boots on the pavement alerted her. She looked over her shoulder and broke into a run at the sight of the four men.
Lyons broke ahead of the sprinting group. He chased the woman as she darted into a side alley that dead-ended fifteen feet from her turn. He had her cornered.
He crouched, looked at his quarry to catch sight of any firearm in the darkness.
She showed no weapon. She had sunk to her knees on the grimy cobbles, leaning her head against the brick wall that blocked her way. She was whimpering.
Lyons rose and turned to address Schwarz and Blancanales. "She's mine," he said softly to his partners. "Leave her to me."
He entered the dead-end alleyway and stepped remorselessly toward the petite blond woman. She let out a scream.
He took a last long, quick step up to her. "Shut your cake hole, dammit," he told her. The muzzle of his Colt touched her forehead.
She choked off her scream, stared up at him like a terrified dog, the tears in her eyes catching the starlight. But this was no mongrel. This bitch was class.
"Why did you do it?" interrogated Lyons. "Why did you get them to take so many hostages?"
"I had nothing to do with it!" she yelled back at him. Her pretty face twisted into ugliness with fear and rage. She clutched her handbag to her chest like a crucifix. "It was the Irish that did it. Irish terrorists. I'm not Irish..."
Lyons shoved his weapon into her right cheekbone and pushed her face sideways against the bricks. Nerve endings in his flexed right forearm told him the venomous kiss of the Colt was only seconds away.
"Why?" he repeated. "Tell me why." His tone condemned her as surely as the hangman's grasp on the trapdoor lever. "Tell me. Now."
The woman's cowardly collapse before him enraged Lyons.
"Listen to me, woman. This gun in my hand I call it my roadblocker, see? Nobody goes anywhere when I've got this thing pulled. So talk. It's all you've got left," and he pushed the barrel up under her top row of teeth, forcing her mouth into a grotesque leer.
She backed away from the muzzle as far as she could, which was less than half an inch. With the gun pointing at her palate, she gasped a defiant confession.
"If I'd killed them all, I'd have had the succession. I'd have been queen for a day, pretty boy. Maybe queen for a lifetime!"
"You're crazy," Lyons pressed. "Twenty dead people and the next in line would have been suspect number one."
"But I was going to be hit, too, jerk." She laughed crazily, saliva splashing from her immobilized mouth. "McGowan would have staged an attack on me as well."
"Then that's the way it's gonna be," Lyons said without emotion. "You're going to be hit too"
"No!" she screamed, cringing. "Don't do it! I beg of you!"
"Lady," Lyons said once again, "I don't have the time."
As his finger pressed on the trigger, Lady Carole shoved the barrel from her mouth with the handbag. Desperately, insanely, she rummaged in the bag for her handgun. Lyons eased up on the finger pressure. He let her find what she sought.
The woman pulled a small caliber piece from the bag and pointed it at her assailant.
Just as she pulled the trigger, Lyons's Colt boomed. The point-blank explosion thrust the woman's small gun under her disintegrating chin, where it discharged in turn.
Lyons's blast had taken her face away, but her own shot creased what remained of her forehead and took off her hair.
Lyons looked aghast as the dead woman's wig flew from the pulpy head to reveal a hairless skull covered in scabs and sores.
The faceless nonbeing lay crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the wall. The woman had been fearfully sick before she died. Cancerous lesions of the skull stood exposed to Lyons as he backed away from the remains.
His partners joined him. The mouth of the small alley filled with curious soldiers and police.
"Good diagnosis, good treatment, Doctor Lyons," Gadgets joked without smiling.
"And in the best tradition of British socialism," observed Blancanales, "she got it free."
18
It was not over for Carl Lyons. The shooting of the Shillelagh woman had disturbed his whole being.
Asleep at the U.S. Embassy four hours after the hit, he thrashed about wildly on the bed. Suddenly he awoke in a sweat. The action on foreign soil maybe killing the woman had set it off again.
He was scared. And he knew damn well what caused him such fear. A recurring nightmare haunted his sleep since his woman hiswoman had met her death. The dreams filled him with horror, especially since the nightmare was different each time. Each hideous experience was a variation on the death of Flor Trujillo