I glared at her, but she stayed where she was.
‘Touching,’ Bimsdale said, leveling the pistol at my chest. ‘And, indeed, correct.’
‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘There’s no reason to kill us.’
‘I don’t write the script,’ he said casually. ‘If you want my opinion, I’d say my principals feel you’re more trouble than you’re worth.’
‘Zig!’ I yelled. That was the call for a rugby move that I’d told Karen about when Sara had been after us in London-both of us made a rapid move to the left. That took us out of the pistol’s immediate line of fire. Taking advantage of the momentary surprise, I dived forward, trying to get my body as horizontal and low as possible. Bimsdale knew what he was doing, because sitting down made his position more secure.
There was a spit and I felt a tug on the back of my shirt. Then my head crashed into his midriff. The air blasted from his lungs and the pistol was flung out of his grip.
Bimsdale let out a yell. I looked round as I wrapped my arms round him. Karen must have hit him. But where was the baby? The agent slipped one of his arms from my grip and backhanded her in the face, sending her spinning backward. I shoved myself up his body and then stopped. Something very sharp was piercing my back.
‘It’s…a…switchblade,’ he said, panting as I increased pressure on his chest. ‘I…found it…on the Soul… Collector’s…body.’
‘Matt!’ Karen screamed.
‘Let…me go,’ Bimsdale gasped.
I kept shoving with my legs, the chair now up against the wall. The pain in my back became almost unbearable, but I wasn’t going to let him harm my family. Behind me, I could hear Magnus crying and Karen moaning.
‘You’re about…to die,’ Bimsdale said, pushing hard against me.
Then I saw his wooden pencil. The end with the eraser had been forced out of his jacket pocket. I remembered a story Dave Cummings had told me about an SAS friend, who had been in a similar situation. This was for Dave.
Ignoring the blinding pain, I moved my head toward Bimsdale’s jacket and got my teeth around the pencil. He realized what I was doing, but couldn’t do anything about it except continue sticking me with the knife. I pulled my head back as far as I could, and then smashed my loaded mouth forward.
There was a muffled shriek and I felt the pain in my back recede slightly. Karen was suddenly close, removing Bimsdale’s hand but leaving the blade in me-she’d been trained for such situations.
‘You’ll be all right, Matt, darling,’ she said, but the tone of her voice, as mournful as an autumn sunset, gave her away.
The last thing I saw was Arthur Bimsdale’s face. The pencil had gone through one of his nostrils and deep into his traitorous brain. The last thing I heard was the conjoined wail of my wife and son.
Epilogue
I lost a kidney and a fair amount of self-respect. After all, Arthur Bimsdale was a lanky kid without special forces training. I should have taken him out with my hands rather than a primary school writing implement. I expressed that feeling to Karen and she dispatched me to the Ice Age with her eyes. After a week in hospital, I was allowed out to make it up to her. I did, somehow managing not to split my stitches.
We spent a week in an FBI apartment looking over the East River. I even managed to tag along on short walks with Karen and Magnus. I could have taken a taxi to the lawyer’s office in Queens that Sara had told me about, but I decided against it. Given her record, whatever she’d stashed there would be a contemporary version of Pandora’s Box. I was still puzzled by her physical condition-the sweats and the pain she seemed to be affected by-but didn’t ask to see the postmortem. Sara’s life was over and so, I decided, was her influence on mine. I could also have checked out the address that Roger had found for the email account of my former lover’s broker, or passed it to the FBI. As it happened, neither was necessary. On our penultimate day in New York, there was a report in the papers of a murder. An economist by the name of Xavier Marias was found near that address, his throat cut. Nothing seemed to have been stolen from his person and there was no indication of who the killer might have been. Sara had somehow got at her broker from beyond the grave. That was another reason to avoid her stash-what else might be waiting for me there?
We were flown to Washington by Bureau jet. Ethan Simonsen was seriously embarrassed over the Bimsdale affair, but I told him to lighten up. As it was, he stuck to us tighter than superglue. We were put up in a smart hotel near the Hoover Building while I was questioned at length. I told them more or less everything I knew. You should always keep something to yourself-in this case, I kept back much of what Sara had told me about her activities. They weren’t germane to the case and, since they had never caught her, they had no claim to title. We visited Quincy several times. I had the feeling he might have known that Karen and Magnus hadn’t died, but I didn’t encourage him to come clean. It was irrelevant now.
I never knew Sir Andrew Frogget, but I had come across his sleazy sidekick Gavin Burrows. The postmortem on the Routh Limited chairman was inconclusive. There were small traces in his bloodstream of a chemical compound that had never been seen before, but it was deemed to be irrelevant. I immediately thought of spies and dirty tricks. Obviously the CIA or their foreign equivalents would be interested in Heinz Rothmann. I let that go-I didn’t need any more hassles. That was also why I’d left Hercules Solutions to the Bureau. As for Arthur Bimsdale, it was assumed he had been conditioned by Rothmann, though the chances of Peter Sebastian having had a second assistant who had been turned struck me as being even more minimal than those of Great Britain becoming the best rugby league team in the world. Besides, I had other things on my mind: baby shit, breast-feeding and its psychological effects on fathers, baby shit…
We were eventually cut loose by the FBI and given tickets for a flight to London. I didn’t have many plans. That was because Karen did. She was going back to work, taking the baby with her until she stopped feeding him, which would be a tester for the Metropolitan Police. I was vaguely thinking about writing a book, but not about our experiences. Perhaps a kids’ story, one with no monsters-and no nameless dead. Rothmann and his sister had stolen the identities of all the people they had conditioned, and their father had been responsible for hundreds of anonymous deaths at Auschwitz. It was beyond me to bring any of those victims back.
There was still the small matter of our wedding. We had some time before the thirty days after Magnus’s birth that Karen stipulated. Maybe we’d slip off to Nevada before we went home. Julie Simms managed to find the engagement ring Peter Sebastian had bought. I considered sending it to his grieving family, but decided against that. He owed us big time.
In the evening, after Magnus dropped off, Karen and I listened to Monteverdi’s Orfeo again. The mythical singer had gone to the underworld to find his dead wife, but had lost her on the way back to the sunlight.
I wasn’t ever going to let go of Karen and our son.