No, there was no point having regrets now. And just look what had happened to his best pal, Angus. He had betrayed SWAT, the idiot. Betrayed the most precious thing they had, all they had. Baptised in fire and united in blood wasn’t an empty phrase, it was how they had to be, there were no alternatives. He wanted this. To know there was some meaning in what he did, that he meant something to people. To his comrades. Even when he couldn’t see any meaning in what they did. That was a job for other people. Not for Angus, the bloody fool. He must have lost the plot. Angus had tried to persuade him to join him, but he had told him to go to hell, he didn’t want anything to do with someone who betrayed SWAT. And Angus had stared at him and asked him how his shoulder had healed so quickly — a gunshot wound like that didn’t heal in a couple of days. But Olafson hadn’t answered. He just showed him the door.
The street ended. They had reached the riverbed.
‘We’re getting warmer,’ Seyton said. ‘Come on.’
They got out and walked by the hovels between the road and the riverbed. Passing house after house as Seyton sniffed the air. At a red building he stopped.
‘Here?’ Olafson asked.
Seyton sniffed in the direction of the house. Then he said aloud, ‘Whore!’ And walked on. They passed a burned-out house, a garage with a wrought-iron gate and came to a blue timber house with a cat on the steps. Seyton stopped again.
‘Here,’ he said.
‘Here?’
Kasi looked at his watch. He had been given it by his father and the hands shimmered green in the darkness, the way he imagined wolves’ eyes did in the night, from the light of a fire. More than twenty minutes had passed. He was fairly sure no one had followed him when he ran from the car park; he had looked back several times and hadn’t seen anyone. The coast ought to be clear now. He knew the area like the back of his hand, that was why he had run straight here. He could go down to Penny Bridge and take the 22 bus from there, go west. Back home. Dad would be there. He had to be there. Kasi stiffened. Had he heard something? The staircase creaking? That was the only wood that had survived the fire, he didn’t know why, just that it creaked when the wind blew or there was a change in the weather. Or if someone came. He held his breath. Listened. No. Probably the weather changing.
Kasi counted slowly to sixty.
Then he pushed the door open with his foot.
Stared.
‘You’re frightened,’ said the man standing outside and looking at him. ‘Smart thinking, hiding in a wardrobe. It keeps in the smell. Almost.’ He stretched his arms out to the side with his palms up. Inhaled. ‘But the air here is wonderful and full of your fear, boy.’
Kasi blinked. The man was lean, and his eyes were like the hands on Kasi’s watch. Wolf eyes. And he had to be old. Not that he looked that old, but Kasi just knew that this man was very, very old.
‘Hel—’ Kasi started to shout, before the man’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat. Kasi couldn’t breathe, and now he knew why he had come here. He was like the river rats. He had come here to die.
39
Duff looked at his watch, yawned and slumped even deeper in the chair. His long legs stretched almost across the hospital corridor, to Caithness and Fleance. Duff’s eyes met Caithness’s.
‘You were right,’ she said.
‘We were both right,’ he said.
It was less than an hour since he had jumped into the car in 15th Street, cursing, and said Macbeth had got away. And that something was afoot. Macbeth had said the mayor wouldn’t live that long.
‘An assassination,’ Malcolm had said. ‘A takeover. He’s gone completely insane.’
‘What?’
‘The Kenneth Laws. If the mayor dies or declares a state of emergency, the chief commissioner takes over until further notice and in principle has unlimited power. Tourtell has to be warned.’
‘St Jordi’s,’ Caithness had said. ‘Seyton’s there.’
‘Drive,’ Duff had shouted, and Fleance stamped on the accelerator.
It had taken them less than twenty minutes, and they heard the first shot from the car park when they stopped in front of the hospital’s main entrance and were on their way up the steps.
Duff closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept, and this should have been over now. Macbeth should have been behind lock and key in Fife.
‘Here they are,’ Caithness said.
Duff opened his eyes again. Tourtell and Malcolm were walking down the corridor towards them.
‘The doctor says Lennox will live,’ Malcolm said and sat down. ‘He’s fully conscious and can talk and move his hands. But he’s paralysed from the middle of the back down, and it’ll probably be permanent. The bullet hit his spine.’
‘It was stopped by his spine,’ Tourtell said. ‘Otherwise it would have gone through him and hit me.’
‘His family are in the waiting room,’ Malcolm said. ‘They’ve been in to see him, and the doctor said that’s enough for today. He’s had morphine and needs to rest.’
‘Heard anything from Kasi?’ Caithness asked.
‘He hasn’t come home yet,’ Tourtell said. ‘But he knows his way around. He may have gone to friends or hidden somewhere. I’m not worried.’
‘You’re not?’
Tourtell pulled a grimace. ‘Not yet.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Duff asked.
‘We wait a few minutes until the family has gone,’ Malcolm said. ‘Tourtell persuaded the doctor to give us two minutes with Lennox. We need a confession as soon as possible from Lennox so that we can get Capitol to issue a federal arrest warrant for Macbeth.’
‘Aren’t our witness statements good enough?’ Duff asked.
Malcolm shook his head. ‘None of us has received death threats directly from Macbeth or personally heard him give an order to murder.’
‘What about blackmail?’ Caithness asked. ‘Tourtell, you just said that when you were playing blackjack in the private room at the Inverness Macbeth and Lady tried to force you to withdraw from the elections, dangling the bait of shares in the Obelisk and threatening to go public with a story of indecent behaviour with an underage boy.’
‘In my line of work we call that kind of blackmail politics,’ Tourtell said. ‘Hardly punishable.’
‘So Macbeth’s right?’ Duff said. ‘We’ve got nothing on him.’
‘We hope Lennox has something,’ Malcolm said. ‘Who should talk to him?’
‘Me,’ Duff said.
Malcolm regarded him pensively. ‘Fine, but it’s just a question of time before someone here recognises you or me, and raises the alarm.’