A grey-red glowing coal was hovering in the air near his eye.
‘Shit.’ He tried to knock it away but it seemed to avoid his hand and moved back like a dragonfly to hover near the fire.
The shock of it sent him reeling.
Anti-gravity!
No wonder they wanted her.
Now other coals were lifting from the fire and hanging in the air.
They scrambled back towards the walls.
Then the girl was on her feet, beside herself with rage, shaking her fists at them, breathing in harsh gasps while dull red coals circled her.
‘Stop it,’ Eve yelled. ‘Right now.’
‘Chicken-skinned shits. You go along with them. You suck.’
‘Nina. Stop.’ Eve’s voice was a harsh command. ‘Or I’ll…’
‘… Send me back to dad? I’ll kill you first.’
A coal sailed toward Eve and seared the front of her blouse. She shrieked and ran from the room.
‘I command thee, ancient serpent, to depart from hence.’ Stromlo was belting out prayers. ‘We beseech thee, Holy Mary, to intercede for this prodigal child and adjure the Father to grant her redemption through the love and mediation of…’
The girl turned to Cain and yelled above the racket, ‘They’re only half-sisters because their dad fucked two women for years — their bloody mums — in the same bed. That’s what gave them the idea. So have you fucked them yet? Fucked my mother? Screwed her blind?’
Cain kept his eyes on the coals. One sailed slowly across the room, hit the carpet, which began to char.
The girl, face distorted, extended her rage to the others. ‘You’re all fucking scum. And that sick old wanker,’ she thrust her arm toward Stromlo, ‘wants to ram it up us all.’
Hot coals started to fly around the room, not in straight lines but erratically like flies, changing course in midair. Several landed on the carpet. Cain kicked the nearest back to the fire and stamped on the spots, knowing now, beyond doubt, that he’d lost his thousand bucks.
‘None of you,’ the girl shrieked, ‘none of them — better come near me!’
27
AMBUSH
Cain sat in the dark on Nina’s bed beside a toy goat stuffed with pyjamas. Her room, at the end of the hall at the front, was opposite Eve’s sewing room. He’d closed all the blinds on the top floor to reduce ambient light. The NVG was good though hard to get used to. The monocular presented the night picture to one eye only so that the other pupil remained dilated and with 90-degree peripheral vision.
It was 4.20 am and the effect of three cups of coffee was waning. He kept alert by moving his attention through his body. He could die tonight if things went wrong — the strongest incentive to be inwardly attentive. To be — not just react.
His attempt at awareness was also a need to be worthy of John who combined all religions in his inner freshness and stability. They had often spoken of the importance of staying inside oneself, contained. Yet this almost impossible effort was only a beginning. Every moment one forgot. As the experience was always fresh, so by definition discontinuous, without an impulse continually renewed…
The handset on his knee flashed red and vibrated — jerking him back — proving he’d disappeared again into thought.
He flicked the thing to silent and checked the dim LED readout. The outer grid registered two directions — side of house and back. This was it.
He switched to the inside grid and waited for them to show. They were registering now — one lot close to the back door, another at his end of the house.
A slight clatter. An aluminium ladder. Smart. The second group were heading for the upstairs sewing-room window.
He crossed the hall into the room, skirted the mounds of material on the floor and entered the disused en suite. It was stacked with cardboard boxes and bags of cloth. He peered around the stack until he could see half the window of the room — a window set into a section of tiled roof and two-thirds covered by a blind.
The muffled noise of ladder on guttering. The click of disturbed tiles. Now a black crescent of rubber sucker projecting just below the blind. The man was releasing the lever to fix it to the glass. He heard the graunch of the cutter. The scene through the NVG was a clear image in shades of green.
The circle of glass was extracted. A gloved hand reached in to trip the latch. Then the window frame slanted and the man had his head in the room.
The intruder’s scope was also a monocular but its eyepiece-train covered both eyes. Cain backed behind the boxes as the man did his first scan. The floor creaked.
It could go two ways from here. And the more effective alternative was most dangerous. If Zuiden were doing this, he wouldn’t shoot now. He’d let the man check the en suite, then silently kill him.
A silent kill? He had a chance — because the limitation with night scopes was 40-degree peripheral vision and, with a double eyepiece, the man couldn’t look everywhere at once.
Cain, filled with adrenaline, dropped the P90 on its strap, stepped clear of the stack, the loop ready. He didn’t know the current method but the technique he’d been taught relied on the garrotte. If you were fast and strong it sliced like a cheese wire back to the spine, severing nerves between brain and heart. The victim couldn’t breathe or cry out.
The bulk of the man in the bathroom. He looked in the shower cabinet first. His mistake.
Cain got the wire around his neck, kneed him in the back to pull him off balance and hauled on the handles with full strength. The other was helpless in two seconds. Cain held him until the weight came on the wire, then lowered him onto bags stacked in the bath.
Then he was out of there, ready to fire.
The second man was in the room, standing behind the sewing machine bench, waiting for his companion to emerge. His carbine pointed to the door while his left hand adjusted his scope. He looked around, registered Cain’s profile as the same masked and scoped figure who’d gone in, and waved him on. The mistake lengthened his life by 40 seconds.
Cain followed the man across the hall into Nina’s bedroom. The bolster fooled the fellow long enough to have him pulling out a pencil torch.
Cain clamped the man’s material-covered mouth and thrust his knife in from behind. Body armour couldn’t stop a thin, sharp blade. It pierced the layered synthetic and sank deep into the chest. It wasn’t instant or particularly quiet. A knifed heart took ten seconds to die.
Cain clamped one arm around the struggling man’s neck, thrust from an undefendable direction. The snap could have been the crack of a stiff joint.
He pushed the twice-dead carcass over the bed. Zuiden would have marked him ‘pass’ so far. This was kill or be killed between professionals — no place for scruples or qualms. You relied on your training, functioned on automatic. He got back to the door, hoping the old phoney downstairs was on the ball.
He got the scope around the doorframe in time to see the second team. Two figures at the top of the back stairs, coming up to check the other bedrooms.
It gave him the required half second. The confusion factor again. He fired on auto, splitting the silence with the chatter of SS90 ball.
The slugs were small enough to get through armour, unstable enough to tumble in flesh. The lead man staggered against the wall, then fell back downstairs, carbine spitting at the ceiling.
The second man returned fire. But Cain, an instant before it came, had dropped. The heavier rounds zinging above him aerated the end wall. Bullets were fast, reflexes slow. The man was back behind the wall the moment he’d fired.