Tom lowered his gun and, trancelike, gazed at it as if he couldn’t work out how it had come to be in his hand in the first place. He went to put it on the table, but Renwick’s voice snapped out.
“Don’t be an idiot, Thomas! On the floor. Kick it toward me.” There was no hint of warmth or kindness in Renwick’s voice. Instead it drilled into Tom, familiar and yet foreign at the same time.
Tom bent down, placed the gun on the floor, and kicked it over to him. Renwick adjusted his grip on his own gun and kept it firmly pointed at Tom as he stooped to pick it up and then slipped it into his pocket.
“Harry? I don’t understand. How? Why?”
Renwick laughed.
“There’s the American in you. Always so keen to understand why. To find a reason. To blame some childhood trauma or unloving sibling. Well, it’s not that easy. You’re not meant to bloody understand people like me, just accept them.”
“But I thought you were dead.” Tom was almost whispering now, his head spinning.
“Why? Because some incompetent policeman found a body in my house? Because Agent Browne says she saw me die? All she saw was two blanks get fired and me go down. By the time she came to, I’d swapped the bodies.”
“Who with?”
“A nobody. Someone who was no longer important to me. Someone who did me a greater service by dying than he ever did when he was alive. After that, it was a simple matter of changing the dental records. How else were they going to identify a burned corpse? They fell for it, of course, as I knew they would. The police are so wonderfully predictable. I’m surprised you did, though, given that you employed a similar trick a few years ago when escaping your CIA masters.”
“You know about that?”
“Oh, there’s not much I don’t know about you, Thomas.”
“I’m only here because of you. To get the people who killed you.”
“How wonderfully loyal of you. I’m almost touched.”
“Who the hell are you?” asked Tom, repelled and yet fascinated by Renwick’s dispassionate tone.
“Can’t you guess?”
There was a long silence.
“Cassius,” Tom breathed. “You’re Cassius.”
Renwick smiled.
“Some people call me that.”
“After all this time, it’s you.” Tom took a step toward Renwick, who raised his gun and narrowed his eyes.
“Be careful, Thomas,” he said gently. “Be very careful.”
“It was all you, wasn’t it?” Tom’s brain was struggling to reorder the past few days’ events in his mind. “You had the coins stolen. Then you got me to do that job in New York so that I’d be in the U.S. at the same time.”
Renwick shrugged.
“I had simply planned to tip off the police but you kindly obliged by dropping a hair at the scene for the police to find. An uncharacteristic oversight. In any event, it all worked out rather well in the end, although at one stage I was concerned that you were taking rather too long to steal the first egg.”
“And then, what? You lost the coins. Steiner stole them from you and gave one to Ranieri to sell.”
Renwick’s face darkened.
“A minor inconvenience. Those responsible paid the price for their interference. Their mistake was to try and sell them back to one of my people.”
“So you got four coins back off Steiner and then bumped into me at Sotheby’s and invited me to dinner with Agent Browne, who just handed over the one coin you didn’t have.”
Renwick gave a short laugh.
“It was rather amusing. The coin showing up in my house, of all places. I’d been thinking about killing Harry Renwick off for a while. He was becoming rather depressing. It was too good an opportunity to miss.” There was no feeling in Renwick’s voice as he spoke, just a sense of relentless, ruthless efficiency.
“But I have to admit you impressed me, Thomas. Even I, who have followed your career so closely over the years, was surprised by your ability to wriggle out of trouble. First you slip out from under the murder charges that I had pinned on you in London. Then you somehow convinced Agent Browne that you had nothing to do with the Fort Knox robbery. Finally, you even escaped from the museum in Amsterdam after I had generously instructed my sniper not to hurt you but just to make sure you got caught.”
“You should have had him kill me when you had the chance.”
“Of course, I considered it. But you know a live suspect is so much more satisfying for the police than a dead one. It stops them having to look for his killers. It closes the circle. The British, the Americans, they would all have believed that they had their man. And in any case, I’m not a complete monster. I owed you that much, at least.”
“And him?” Tom nodded toward Van Simson, who had remained silent during the entire exchange, his face slack and gray.
“Darius?” Renwick’s voice rose again as he glanced at Van Simson. “He should have stuck to bribing politicians and murdering his business rivals. By the way, I don’t know what he told you, but Agent Browne’s very much alive. I’m so glad. She seemed a charming young lady.”
Tom’s heart jumped and his eyes pressed shut momentarily. She was alive. That was one thing, at least.
“But you, Thomas, unlike Darius here, have a choice. It’s not too late. Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
Renwick took a step toward him, his hand outstretched. “You could join me. You’d be amazed at what we could accomplish together. As a team. As a family. We’d be unstoppable.” For the first time since Renwick had appeared, Tom detected just a hint of pleading in Renwick’s voice, sensed an unspoken need in his eyes.
Tom laughed.
“You really are mad. You took away the only real family I had left when you killed Harry Renwick. And now you offer it back at the point of a gun? I have no idea who you are anymore.”
“Then you’re about to find out.”
Renwick reached into his pocket, took out the gun that Tom had kicked over to him, aimed it at Van Simson’s chest, and fired.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
The bullet lifted Van Simson clean out of his chair and he thudded to the floor, limp. Sensing his opportunity, Tom dived to his left, rolling off the platform and running into the middle of the vault. Renwick reacted instantly, firing off three shots in the blink of an eye as he tracked Tom across the room. But the bullets smashed harmlessly into the bulletproof glass sheets suspended over each of the display cases, the glass cracking but holding firm. As Tom had remembered they would.
“A pointless gesture, Thomas,” Renwick shouted coldly, the echo of the shots still pinballing around the room. “Come out now and I’ll spare you. Of course, they’ll probably send you to prison for killing poor old Darius here when they find your prints all over the murder weapon, but at least you’ll be alive.”
The room was silent.
“So be it,” Renwick muttered. He stepped off the platform and, steeling himself, leaped around the side of the case where Tom had rolled only seconds before, gun gripped in both outstretched hands.
There was no one there.
“Stop playing games,” Renwick hissed.
Nothing.
His anger was replaced by a look of grim determination. Working methodically, he moved through the room, checking behind every display case as he went, his gun leading him around the corner of each case in a series of tightly choreographed steps, the soles of his shoes squeaking against the floor like sneakers on a basketball court. Suddenly, a smile flickered across his lips. Ahead of him, barely visible, he could just see the tip of a shoe poking out from the cabinet in front of him.