Sixty seconds to go.
Jamie put his back to the panel, paddles behind his back.
Molly was standing in the hallway.
“You never answered my question,” she said.
Keene opened the door and fired the Ruger.
There was no need to play it cute. Keene had a feeling that McCoy would spot a ruse in a microsecond.
But the bullet struck bare wall. Something sliced at his forearm, ripping through skin and muscle. A butcher knife.
“Ah, you cunt.”
The gun tumbled from Keene’s hand. Keene threw his weight into the door. It slammed into McCoy. Keene pivoted, then booted McCoy in the testicles so hard, it sent him staggering backwards. He smashed his head into the corner of an oak bureau.
Keene, the pain in his forearm overpowering, fell backwards. Landed on his ass. A simple slash across the arm shouldn’t hurt so much.
McCoy either had braced himself or didn’t actually have testicles, because he recovered quickly. He opened the bottom drawer next to him. Reached below a stack of six T-shirts. Always with his T-shirts. The one on the top said the bad plus.
He’d hidden a gun under there. It was a Ruger, too.
Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.
They were both students of the old school.
“Have a nice walk?” McCoy said, then shot Keene in the chest.
“Come with me,” she said.
“No,” Jamie said. Trying to keep his breathing under control.
“You don’t have to pretend,” she said. “I can give you everything you want.”
How many seconds had elasped? Ten? At most?
Keep yourself calm.
Keep her talking.
Molly started walking toward him. “Come with me and we can leave this building. Right now.”
“No,” Jamie said. “Not until you tell me what this is about. Why everyone on this floor had to die.”
“What does it matter? You going to write a book about it?” She smiled.
Jamie could hear the high-pitched whine. Could she?
“I want to know.”
Molly was just a few feet away. Jamie pretended to lean back against the wall, frightened. Which was not too difficult to pretend.
Had a half a minute gone by yet?
“This is just a company. We’re just employees. I’m going for a promotion. Not just for me. For both of us. And now I want to know if you’ll come with me.”
“How can I just leave my life behind?”
“Is it really a life you’ll miss?”
Behind him, something clicked.
She touched his chest.
Smiled.
Jamie pressed the defibrillator paddles against Molly’s chest and squeezed the plastic handles. Prayed it had been enough time.
It had.
There was a loud pop.
She yelped. The shock blew her body back across the hall. Down there on the floor, she looked like a puppet with her strings cut.
Jamie droppped the paddles. God bless OSHA, which had started to require these devices in buildings over twenty stories in downtown Philadelphia. Even the abandoned floors of buildings.
The shock wouldn’t be enough to kill her. Even from this distance, he could see her chest moving. But it would buy him time until he figured a way off this floor.
Even if he had to lift a desk and hurl it through the glass. Let the firemen below know that there were people up here in need of rescue.
The conference room was his best bet. Maybe he could use that gun to shoot out the glass. Ah, damn it! He kicked himself for not thinking about that before. Shoot the glass and start heaving office furniture out. A chair first, to get their attention. Then the conference room table itself, if he had to.
Jamie started down the hallway but stopped when he felt something on his pant leg.
Fingers.
Yanking the material downward.
“You,” Molly said, “never answered my question.”
The wound was mortal; Keene knew that. There wasn’t much time. The bullet must have nicked quite a few arteries. He could imagine the inside of his chest with miniature leaking hoses, and an imaginary coronary engineer throwing his hands up, exasperated. What am I supposed to do now? I can’t fix this.
He also had a pain in his arse.
Literally. Something hard, jabbing him in the soft, fleshy part of his cheek.
“You just find out, or have you known for a while? I’m thinking you just found out.”
Keene looked at McCoy. His lover had a smirk on his face. Ordinarily, Keene took great pleasure in that smirk. It made him horny.
“I’m not going to sit here and explain it all to you,” McCoy said. “I hate that.”
“Yeah,” Keene said. At least, he thought he said it. It might have been in his mind.
“I will tell you this, though. And this is more of a personal note, though it does cross over slightly into the business end of things.”
“Yeah?”
McCoy. Always drawing things out. Forcing you to ask “what?” or “yeah?” or something. Even as he sat here, dying.
“I’m not even gay.”
Keene’s fingers found the Ruger, under his arse. He had the strength to lift it. So of course he had the strength to squeeze the trigger. Repeatedly. He blasted off the five remaining shots.
Most of the bullets hit McCoy. There was just one miss, making for a grand total of two bullets the next occupant of this flat would have to pry out of the walls.
If they were being observed—which was absurd, but still—people would be tempted to think it was all about the gay comment. But as he felt his lifeforce ebbing away, Keene mentally denied it, saying he was just being a professional to the end.
Doing his job.
Like always.
After alclass="underline"
There is no limit to a human being’s ability to rationalize the truth.
Molly hurled him against the wall.
She tried doing that paralyze-you-with-your-own-fingers thing again, but her hands were slick with blood. Jamie slipped away and tried to crawl across the floor. He felt her hand on his waistband. Jamie kicked backwards, caught her on the leg. She exhaled, then grabbed his ankle, flipped him, and kicked him in the chest with her heel.
It felt like someone had flipped a valve in his chest. Jamie’s breath was trapped in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe in. He couldn’t breathe out. His fingers clawed at the carpet involuntarily, sending fresh waves of agony across his injured hand.
But he wasn’t really thinking about that, because more important, he couldn’t breathe.
Then Molly started dragging him across the floor.
Forty-three hundred miles away from Edinburgh, in a quiet rooming house on the outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin, a woman in a T-shirt and jeans watched the video image of another man shooting his lover to death.
A few minutes later, the shooter—an operative using the name Will Keene—appeared to die, too. It was a sudden and shocking end to months of surveillance. She wasn’t sure what this one was all about; her superiors never told her. Just watch them, they said. So she did. As often as she could. They were an interesting pair to watch. Kind of like an old married couple. She never thought it would have ended like this. They genuinely seemed to care about each other. But boom, there it was—the fight, the knife, the guns, and the short conversation before the final, repeated coups de grâce.
That was totally about the gay crack, she thought.
The woman picked up the phone and called her director. People would have to be sent.
As she waited on hold, she idly wondered who’d she be watching next, then thought about pizza.