He meant the gravestones, River thought dizzily.
Then: No.
He meant the whole village.
Katinsky said, “Each of the cicadas has enough to create one large bomb. And each has been told where to plant it. It’s the instruction they’ve been waiting for for years. Now they know why they were dispatched to Upshott. It was to be in place to destroy an enemy.”
“You’re mad. They won’t have done it.”
“I gave them everything,” he said. “Their identities, their start in life. And for more than twenty years they’ve been waiting, Walker. Waiting for the call that will activate them. That’s what cicadas do. They wake up and sing.”
“Even if they’ve planted these bombs. What good will it do?”
“I told you. It will redress a balance. And demonstrate that history never forgives.”
“You’re absolutely fucking insane.”
“You’re not so confident, then? That they won’t do it?”
River had been hoarding strength. All that energy that fizzed through his body, all of it that hadn’t been dissipated by the longest night of his life, was being summoned, and in a second he’d leap to his feet. Strange that he still felt fluid and helpless. “They’re not who you think. Not any more. They’ve been here too long.”
“We’ll see.” He held up the iPhone. “I’ll do a ring-round.”
“You’re going to ask them?”
Katinsky laughed and took a step back. “No, boy,” he said. “I’ll talk to the bombs. What, you think they’re attached to a fuse? They detonate remotely. Like this.”
He pressed numbers.
Webb was breathing, and his eyelids fluttered as Louisa bent over him. “Don’t die,” she said. He didn’t react. “Prick,” she added. He didn’t react to that, either.
Kyril wasn’t there. He’d handily left a trail of blood, though.
Still panting, she followed it. He’d made for the stairwell, but had gone up, not down. It must have been slow progress, judging by the blood. And came to an end two landings up, where he lay slumped against the wall, his face twisted into an agonized scribble.
“Making a run for it?”
“Bitch.”
It was a scratchy whisper. It didn’t seem likely he’d be shouting any warnings.
“He’s on the roof, isn’t he? You’ve got a chopper coming.”
But Kyril rolled his eyes and said no more.
He carried no weapon. If Pashkin was up there, she’d be a sitting duck. So she went through the last door carefully, or tried to. But the wind caught it and slammed it open.
Three hundred metres above London’s streets, there was a fair lick of breeze.
The mast was on the opposite side of the roof: a graceful thin blade reaching up into the blue. Between here and there was a shanty-like collection of air-con vents, aerial casings, lightning rods and what looked like concrete stylings of garden sheds, housing lift machinery or other staircases. Oddly seedy for a highpomp building, but most slick operations had their grimy underside: this is what was going through her mind when a bullet chipped the door behind her.
She rolled behind a ship’s funnel-shaped vent and scrambled to a sitting position.
“Louisa?”
Pashkin. He had to shout to be heard up here, higher than the birds.
“Nowhere to go, Pashkin,” she shouted back. “The cavalry are coming.”
He was behind one of the shed-structures lining the building’s west side, it sounded like. The east side dropped a level to a flatter expanse, where a helicopter could land, but hadn’t yet. To left and right she saw no city, only sky, faintly smudged by oily smoke. A ludicrously thin railing marked the edge of the roof. If that was all there was to keep her from pitching into the void, she hoped the wind didn’t pick up.
“Yes,” he shouted back. “I’ve booked a ride. Have you got a gun, Louisa?”
“Of course I bloody have.”
“Perhaps I’ll come and take it from you.”
It seemed she was out of range of his signal blocker out here, because her phone rang.
“Kind of busy.”
“I sent for an air-ambulance. They say there’s already one on the way. Louisa—”
“Way ahead of you.”
Why arrange for your own pilot when you could hijack an air ambulance?
He was behind one of those shed structures, unless he wasn’t. Might even be right behind this vent, crawling round to her. Part of her hoped so.
Louisa wasn’t stupid. She’d brought the fireaxe with her.
“Louisa? Go back inside. Close the door. I’ll be gone in a few minutes. No harm, no foul, isn’t that what they say?”
“Not in this country they don’t.”
She hoped her voice sounded steady. A thin wisp of cloud above was scudding so fast it was making her dizzy. If she closed her eyes, she might roll to that railing, and beyond.
“Because otherwise, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Like you had to kill Min?”
“Well, you I’ll shoot. But the outcome will be the same, yes.”
Oh Christ, she thought. Crouching with her back to an air-con vent atop the City’s tallest building while a well-dressed gangster cracked wise. I’m in Die Hard.
“Louisa?”
He sounded nearer, but it was hard to tell. Last night, she’d have taken him with pepper spray and plasti-cuffs, and all this would have been over. But bloody Marcus had interfered so here she was instead, way above London, and Pashkin had a gun.
And what did I think I was doing, racing up here unarmed?
Though the answer was no further away than her memories of Min, whom this bastard had murdered for an armful of diamonds.
She thought she could hear a helicopter.
Choices, choices. She could do as he’d said, and head back in to safety. Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot her in the back before hijacking the helicopter. On the streets below, all was chaos. He’d force it down in Hyde Park, disappear among the crowds. Think! She thought. Or rather, didn’t think: she stood instead, and launched herself across the gap between where she’d been crouching and the next place of shelter, a sturdy chunk of concrete inside which lift machinery silently waited.
She landed flat, expecting gunfire which didn’t come. The fireaxe skittered from her grasp, and came to rest a few feet away.
“Louisa?”
“Still here.”
“That was your last chance.”
“Toss the gun over here. That’ll knock a few years off your sentence.”
There was definitely a helicopter, and it was definitely getting nearer.
“You aren’t armed, Louisa. This won’t end well.”
The fireaxe had given that away. Nobody with a gun would have come hefting a heavy blade.
Which lay outside the range of her shelter. She stretched for it, and this time he did shoot: missing her hand but hitting the axe handle, making it spin wildly. She yelped.
“Louisa? Are you hurt?”
She didn’t reply.
The steady whump-whump of the helicopter blades grew louder. If the pilot saw an armed man, he wouldn’t land; he’d go whumping away … She had to show him Pashkin had a gun. If Min were here, he’d tell her what a stupid plan that was, but Min wasn’t here because he was dead, and if she didn’t do something now, the man who’d killed him would be whisked off. The axe might come in useful. She reached for it again, and a heavy boot crunched onto her hand.
She looked up into Pashkin’s eyes. He glared back, genuinely irritated that she was putting him to this trouble. In one hand he held a cloth bag, swollen to the size of a football. Lot of diamonds.
In the other he held the gun, aimed straight at her head.