“Damn it!” Shaw doubled over in pain.
The Pole leapt past him, pushed Katie down, and sprinted through the door. Shaw recovered and, holding his arm, ran after him, Katie right on his heels. They clattered down the steps, Shaw moving as fast as he could with his bad wing, but the much smaller Lesnik was seemingly jet-propelled. He hit the door to the street and was through it while Shaw and Katie were still a flight above.
Shaw smashed the door open and skidded to a stop to survey the street. Katie bumped into him. She grabbed his jacket.
“Have you lost your damn mind!” she screamed.
He suddenly saw Lesnik across the street, on the Thames side. He bolted across the road, car horns blaring, taxis swerving to avoid him as Katie followed in his wake yelling at him to stop before he killed himself.
Shaw shouted at Lesnik, who was running down the sidewalk. The Pole turned around for an instant, his face full of fear.
The shot struck him right between the eyes. He stood there for a moment, seemingly unaware his life had just ended. Then he pitched backward and over the railing. A few seconds later his body hit the flat surface of the river. A few moments after that Lesnik disappeared under the dull-colored Thames, the water briefly turning a murky crimson.
At the sound of the shot, Shaw had immediately hunched down. As Katie started to run past him yelling for Lesnik, he reached out his good arm and snagged her leg, wrenched her down, and then pulled her over behind a parked car for cover.
“Stay down!” he urged. “That was a long-range rifle round.” He edged his head above the car’s fender and took a look around, checking for an optics signature from the sniper gun but seeing none.
He looked back at Katie and his expression softened. She was shaking.
“It’s okay now.” He put an arm around her.
“No, it is not okay,” she snapped, ripping his arm off her. “You had to come here. You had to butt in. And now an innocent man is dead! Because of you!’
“Neither one of us knows how is innocent he really is,” Shaw said calmly. “But right now we need to get out of here. The police-”
“You can run. I want to talk to the police. It’ll be good background for the story.”
“You’re still going to write it?” he said incredulously.
“You bet I am. And you want to know something funny? Until you bulled your way into this whole thing I’d decided to table it, at least for a while. But now?” She looked in the direction of where Lesnik lay dead. “Now, I changed my mind.”
“Katie, listen to me-”
She cut him off again. “No, you listen to me, Shaw. I know the woman you loved got killed. I know you’re hurting. I know your life is even shittier than mine right now, but you crossed the line back there. No, you obliterated it. And I will never trust you again.”
The sound of a siren reached them. Shaw glanced away and then looked back at her.
“You better get going. The police won’t be your best friend right now.”
“Katie, I don’t think you know what you’re getting into.”
“What I’m getting into, you sorry-ass son of a bitch, is the truth. Now get the hell out of here.”
Shaw’s eyes flashed at her for an instant, but they seemed to have lost their effect on the woman.
“Now!” she screamed at him.
As he rose to go, she said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mention you in the story. Consider it a parting gift.”
CHAPTER 63
KATIE CALLED KEVIN GALLAGHER and filled him in on what had happened. When he finally stopped hyperventilating, he only had one question: “When can you deliver the story?”
“It’s already written. I can e-mail it to you right now. You can fact-check the crap out of it and then run it.”
“Your contact is dead?”
“Yes. The police are investigating.”
“Did they talk to you?”
“I only gave them the barest essentials and didn’t reveal anything he’d told me. This is front page, right, Kevin?”
“Front page! Front page! Four-inch headline, Katie. Just like we do when war’s declared. Send the story right now and I’ll call you after I read it.”
She put down the phone, hesitated for a moment, hit the send key, and the e-mail sailed to the man. Just like when war’s declared. She thought about Shaw’s words. What if a world war happened? She felt a tingle shoot down her spine.
Gallagher called back twenty minutes later; she could sense his drool from across the ocean.
“We’ll run this in the morning edition,” he promised. “We still have time.” He added worriedly, “No chance we’ll get scooped?”
“Lesnik won’t be talking to anybody else, if that’s what you mean. But look, Kevin, I can’t absolutely prove that my contact was actually in the building that day. It’s all circumstantial. I have no corroborating source. That’s not how I usually do things.”
“There’s no way in hell he’d have those details if he hadn’t been in there, Katie. The London police haven’t released any of that information, and believe me we’ve tried to get it. And the fact that someone killed him? I think that’s proof enough. I’ve led off stories with less, just like every other newspaper. I mean look at the Duke lacrosse team and Richard Jewell fiascoes.”
“Operative word being fiasco, Kevin.” Katie suddenly wasn’t that certain anymore.
“Don’t worry. Here’s to your third Pulitzer, Katie. Go have a drink on me.”
Katie flinched. “I actually have a little problem in that regard. I thought you would’ve heard.”
“I did, but so what? Get wasted. A story like this deserves it.”
Whether it was this callous remark or something embedded deeply in Katie’s soul, there was a definite pop in her brain.
“Wait a minute, Kevin!”
“What?”
“You can’t print the story, not yet.”
“Are you kidding?”
“You wait until I call back and give you the go-ahead. I have to check out something first.”
“Katie! My instincts are telling me-”
“Shut up and listen,” she screamed into the phone. “You don’t have instincts. It was my ass running all over the world getting shot at while people like you sat behind your nice safe desk, okay? You don’t give a shit about anything other than selling newspapers. You will hold that story until I tell you otherwise. And if you screw me, I will personally come to your house and rip your face off. And now I’m going to hang up and go have that drink you so graciously suggested, you bastard!”
She threw down the phone in disgust, took a deep breath, and tried to stop shaking. A few minutes later she was in the hotel bar steeling herself with a whiskey soda for what she was about to do. And then she had a second one. A third would have followed, but she somehow wrenched herself off the barstool after watching a guy next to her pass out in his own drool.
She walked outside, passing the Charles Dickens House. It was one of the many residences that the author had occupied in London but the only one now used as a museum. She wondered if even Dickens’s prodigious imagination could have contemplated the absolute nightmare she found herself in. Probably she would have had to look to Kafka to do it justice.
She reached a small park, sat down on a bench, took out her cell phone, and called him.
He answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“Can we talk?”
“I thought you made your position perfectly clear already.”
“I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“Please, Shaw. It’s important.”
The café was near King’s Cross Station. She sat outside and waited for him, watching the “bendy-buses,” as Londoners had dubbed them. They had taken the place of the double-deckers and were basically two buses joined together by a flex joint. They were not liked very much by Londoners because they often clogged the city’s narrow intersections when making a turn.