Even as the fire began behind him and the curtains burned as quickly as rags, his gun was aimed at Gant. He drew the Smith & Wesson and fired twice, ducking back against the plaster that splintered from his attacker's shots, stippling his cheek with fragments like small stones.
The man lay sprawled back across a flaming rug, his clothes already smouldering. The crackle of an RT stronger than the crackling of wood catching fire. The second man was still outside the window. Gant launched himself down the short flight of stairs, not pausing to glance at the window, turning instead towards the kitchen, running-colliding.
His breath deserted him, his body was shocked into vulnerability as he lurched back against the heavy table, seeing the man he had collided with arched against the sink, as if they were two fighters resting.
Through the window, a fuzzy image of men running. He thought he recognised the figure and stride of one of the team from Oslo. The man against the sink was coughing air back into his lungs. Gant struck him across the temple with the stubby barrel of the revolver, the foresight cutting the skin open. Even as the man fell aside, Gant was opening the door and running towards the barn.
His ears pounded. It was difficult to snatch air into his lungs, the knowledge that he was running towards a marksman compressing his chest.
Someone shouted as the first shot whined away near his shoulder. A window shattered behind him. He plunged through an open gate in a low stone wall into the dappled shadows of trees. A small orchard. Old nuts, empty shells, cracked beneath his feet. A tree was white-scarred by other shots as he surged through the orchard bent almost double. Sunlight, shadow, sunlight The land dropped sharp as a grassy cliff away from the orchard towards a grove of dark trees, towards fields dotted with animals and fringed with lines of holm-oak.
Beyond the nearest field, gleaming through the trees, the glint of water. He saw the immediate landscape like an aerial map, from the vantage of the Cessna.
He glanced back. Flame licked from a window, pale in the afternoon light. Puffs of smoke. Three men running after him into the orchard, the one he thought he had recognised from the hangar in Oslo waving his arms, directing the others into flanking movements.
He skittered down the steep slope, the long, lush meadow grass brushing against his knees. He stumbled, falling. Two shots whined over his head, the flat cracks of the rifle startling a grazing cow, which lumbered away from him. He scrabbled to his knees, looking back. They were already coming quickly down the slope. The trees and the water were still a hundred yards or more away.
Gant ran, weaving like some manic foot baller evading invisible tackles. There were two more shots. He swerved left, right, right again, left-crashed into a thin branch, then through tough, restraining bushes. Lost balance, stumbled forward, then rolled. Water drenched him. The banks of the stream were high and close, the water no more than a couple of feet deep. He was holding the revolver above his head as if frozen in a desperate waving action. Trees leaned heavily over the slow water. For moments only, he was hidden from them.
David Winterborne's office looked down on Poultry's narrow street, and across towards the Bank of England and the Mansion House. He could also see the Royal Exchange and St. Mary Woolnoth, the oblong Hawksmoor tower which struggled to symbolise faith, surrounded as it was by the high rises of banks. David had selected the location for his corporate headquarters years before, when the view from the windows had seemed more necessary; an attempt to suggest that Winterborne Holdings truly belonged in the City.
He looked now at the church, imagining its ornate, baroque interior, its columns and baldachino reredos. It was Marian who had first taken him inside, made him look properly, lectured him. Marian, naturally
… Irritated by the recollection, or even the pigeons on the windowsill, Winterborne turned to face his desk. The screen of his PC held the e-mail letter he had drafted to Strickland.
It could be sent anonymously, without trace. It contained a proposal for a commission. A target for one of Strickland's bombs. The letter purported to come from a third-party fixer on behalf of some shadowy, extremist Middle East group.
The target was not specific, but Strickland would be able to deduce that it was Arafat… The traitor to the dispossessed people and to God, the puppet of the Zionists Winter borne had enjoyed creating that description. Hamas and Hizbollah, or Islamic Jihad, were never subtle in their condemnations.
The proposed fee was half a million US dollars. Strickland would be tempted not by the money, but by the fact that he had once, years before, failed to kill Arafat.
He had probably been employed by the Israelis on that occasion. The Chairman of the PLO had left the bathroom in which the device had been placed ten seconds before it was remotely detonated. Strickland's failure had humiliated him. He would be unable to resist another chance. His pride in his infallibility was the glue that held him together.
Strickland would respond to the e-mail via his own PC. He would have no idea to whom his reply was being addressed. Even if he had a suspicion that it was a trick to draw him out into the open, he would still come. The prize was too tempting to resist, Winterborne was certain of that. Strickland would offer a meeting on neutral ground.
However careful he proved to be, he would come and then he would be eliminated.
Winterborne would transmit the enticement in another moment or two.
Meanwhile, there was the Bach on the CD player. The B minor Prelude and Fugue filled the office. The music seemed appropriate to Hawksmoor's church, to the elegant cornicing and ceiling rose of the room and the heavy bookshelves, and to his mood. Reflective intimacy in the prelude, the profound yet strict order of the fugue which followed. He listened for a few moments, remembering that it had been Marian who had given him his appreciation of music. Effortlessly clever Marian… He shook his head and scrabbled the remote control from his desk, switching off the music almost savagely.
He studied his desk, supporting his weight on his knuckles. His application for US citizenship moved smoothly, oiled by lobbyists and tame Congressmen… The leasing deals for Skyliner lay like raked leaves… Other businesses prospered. His staff, in other offices, busied themselves with sublime confidence, skating on newly thickened ice that bore no resemblance to the thin, dangerous crust on which he had been moving with so much caution only weeks ago.
Now, he was poised. Once the citizenship was settled, he could move on the microprocessor firms, the construction and other companies he needed to weld together to form the hull of what would become Winterborne Holdings in the US.
He would be raiding, soon. The US banks were now eager to lend and CEOs of companies were keen to sell out to him, for the appropriate golden balm.
It still unnerved, like a recollected nightmare, the thought that it might all have fallen into ruin because Aero UK could not sell Skyliner and Euro-funds had had to be diverted to prop the company up. The discovery of the fraud would have ended — everything.
What was necessary had been done. It was over.
He thought of Marian again and of a withering description she had offered of him after an early piece of stock manipulation had outraged her. You're a mixture of Buddhist fatalism and European imperialism, David, a contradiction. Because of the one you believe it doesn't matter what actions you take, and because of the other your actions are those of a bandit… Why?