Cramer took a deep breath. The dull ache in his stomach had begun to ease. He wondered if it was the medicine starting to weaken it or if the fear of what he was about to do was stimulating his body’s own natural painkillers. Whatever, in a few seconds he wouldn’t be feeling any pain. He took several deep breaths, then slowly brought the gun up so that the barrel was touching the tip of his nose. He could smell the lubricating oil that he’d used the last time he’d cleaned it. He licked his lips. They were as dry as his throat. He closed his eyes as if in prayer, but Mike Cramer had long since stopped believing in God or any higher power. It wasn’t heaven he was planning to visit, just a dark empty place where there would be no pain and no regrets. All it would take was to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. He’d fired the gun a thousand times on the range in the school, with Allan shouting encouragement. He could pull the trigger one last time. He pictured Allan standing behind him. Point. Aim. Take a breath. Let half of it out. Squeeze, don’t jerk. He imagined Allan’s voice, calm and confident. Cramer slipped the barrel between his lips. He almost gagged on the metal cylinder as his thumb tightened on the trigger. He took a deep breath. Slowly he began to exhale.
‘Cramer?’ Su-ming’s voice pierced his thoughts like a lance. He opened his eyes. Before he could react she had put her hands over his and pulled the gun away from his face. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘What does it look like?’
‘How dare you?’ she said angrily. She twisted the gun out of his grasp. He was much stronger than she was but she took him by surprise. ‘How dare you do this?’ She stood in front of him, her eyes flashing.
Cramer was genuinely confused. ‘What do you mean?’
She held the gun in front of his face. ‘You’d do this, with me here? How do you think I’d feel? You’d kill yourself with me in the next room? Just what was I expected to do, Mike Cramer? Wait for the ambulance to come? Have you die in my arms?’
‘Hey. .’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t hey me, don’t you dare hey me.’ She slammed the Walther down on the coffee table.
‘Jesus, Su-ming, be careful,’ said Cramer. ‘It could go off.’
She glared at him and Cramer couldn’t help but smile. ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ she said. ‘This isn’t funny.’
He held up his hands in surrender. ‘I’m not laughing at you,’ he said. ‘It’s just ironic, that’s all. There was I going to. . you know. . and now I’m worried that it might go off accidentally.’
‘English humour?’ she said dismissively. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s anything funny about trying to kill yourself.’
Cramer sat back in the sofa and looked away. She picked up the bottle of capsules. ‘What are these?’ she asked.
‘Painkillers,’ he said.
She frowned and sat down on the sofa next to him. She put a hand on his leg, her touch as soft as a child’s kiss. ‘How sick are you?’ she asked.
‘Very,’ he said. He finally turned to look at her. ‘Why else do you think I’d. .?’ He left the sentence unfinished.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise.’
‘I thought you were psychic,’ said Cramer, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
‘I have feelings, that’s all. But I always found it difficult to read you, Cramer.’
‘Yeah? Why’s that?’
Su-ming lowered her eyes. ‘I was confused,’ she said.
‘Well, now you know,’ he said. He looked across at her. Her hair had fallen across her face like a black veil. ‘What do you mean, confused?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
Cramer snorted softly. ‘Not that it matters now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m dying, Su-ming. I’m not going to get better, there’s nothing anyone can do. I’m going to die and I’m going to die in a great deal of pain.’
‘Isn’t there. .?’
‘There’s nothing,’ he interrupted sharply. ‘There’s no miracle cure, no operation, no nothing.’
Su-ming held up the bottle of capsules. ‘Don’t these help?’
‘A bit. But they’re not a cure, they just dull the pain. They’re only temporary. Su-ming, I really don’t want to talk about this. Just go. Leave me alone.’
‘So you can kill yourself?’
Cramer shrugged half-heartedly. ‘Don’t make this harder than it is.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears. There were tears in her eyes but she blinked them away as if she didn’t want him to see her cry. ‘Remember when you gave me the I Ching reading?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘I had to ask a question, remember?’ Su-ming nodded. ‘And you remember the answer?’
‘An end to sadness,’ she said softly.
‘That’s right. An end to sadness. And I had to bring about that end myself. That’s what the I Ching said. The change must come from within. That was the answer to my question.’
‘And what was the question, Cramer?’
Cramer rubbed his hands together as if trying to keep warm. ‘I wanted to know how I’d die,’ he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.
Su-ming said nothing for a few seconds, then she impulsively put her arms around him and held him close. He felt something soft brush against his cheek and he realised that she’d kissed him.
The Colonel sat down at his desk as two troopers carried large cardboard boxes out of the apartment. The telephones and fax machines were still in place. The Colonel had hoped to receive confirmation of the assassin’s identity before leaving for Hereford, but it appeared that it wasn’t going to happen. He thought about calling Dan Greenberg to see if the Bureau had managed to obtain a match through their files, but decided against it. He was sure that Greenberg would notify him if he’d come up with an identification.
A sheaf of fax paper lay in the tray connected to the fax machine. It was the information that Greenberg had been sending through when the assassin had struck. The Colonel hadn’t had time to look through the faxes. He picked them up and was about to run them through a shredding machine when he had second thoughts. He flicked through the sheets. There were more than twenty sheets of close-typed reports, most of them from FBI files. The Colonel settled back in his high-backed chair and started to read. Anton Madeley was a nasty piece of work, and if he hadn’t been locked up in Marion Prison he could well have been a suspect in the recent killings. Marion Prison was a super-maximum security facility built by the US Federal Bureau of Prisons to replace Alcatraz, surrounded by a thirty-foot-high fence and bullet-proof watchtowers. Only the worst of the worst ended up there, and all of them were kept in virtually permanent solitary confinement. According to the psychiatric reports compiled before Madeley was sentenced, he had psychopathic tendencies but was well aware of what he had been doing. He’d tortured more than a dozen men and women, then killed them. There was no sexual motive, the psychiatrists reported, it appeared that Madeley was more interested in causing pain. And once he’d had his fill of torturing his victims, his method of killing them was always the same: two shots with a handgun, one shot to the face, one to the heart.
The Colonel scratched his chin. According to the psychiatric reports, Madeley believed that shooting his victims in the head trapped their soul, extending their misery into eternity. The man was obviously demented, but the psychiatrists insisted he was sane and should be sentenced as such. The Colonel wondered if Madeley had a relative who had decided to carry on his legacy. He flicked through the sheets and came to a sheet of biographical data. Madeley was fifty-two years old, had never married and had no known children. He was an only child, his mother had died when he was twelve and his father had abused him, physically and mentally. Madeley was taken into care and spent four years with foster parents, parents who Madeley claimed abused him as much as his father ever did. There appeared to be no one who was close to Madeley, so the Colonel discounted his theory that it was a family member whom Allan had killed in the car park. Madeley had left the foster home when he was sixteen and spent the rest of his life in and out of prisons, initially for stealing cars and graduating swiftly to mail order fraud. He had no known friends or associates, he was a true loner.