The sick punch of nausea in Purkiss’s lower abdomen was rising, filling his chest and his throat. He fought not to vomit, waves of dull agony blurring his vision, and bore down on Donovan, but the older man was already slipping out from under him and pulling free.
Purkiss rose from his knees, staggering, and managed to put up an arm as Donovan’s kick snapped at his jaw, deflecting the foot to one side, not smartly enough to throw the older man off-balance.
Somehow, Purkiss found his feet once again. He grabbed at Donovan but the man darted out of his way and stooped and picked up the gun belonging to the second guard and aimed it at Purkiss.
Donovan said, ‘Wait.’
It wasn’t clear whom he was speaking to — nothing was clear — and the tableau assumed a slowed-down, dream-like quality.
Purkiss took in Donovan, six feet away and with the gun trained on him. He saw both guards on their feet, one starting to run towards Donovan and Purkiss, the other taking a bead on Asher, who was aiming back at him.
The door to the living room, which had hung ajar, swung into the room again as someone — Saburova — came through.
The guard with the gun pivoted and brought his pistol to bear on Saburova, his mouth contorted in a yell.
Behind him, Asher fired, the flash from the muzzle of his gun preceding the roar of the shot by a hair’s breadth of time.
The armed guard jerked forward as the bullet met its mark in his back.
Saburova dived, lifting off her feet, and cannoned into the other guard, knocking him across the floor.
Donovan turned, his gun arm angled across at Asher.
Asher shot him, twice, a double tap, both hits squarely in the chest so that the crimson duo of the exit wounds bloomed on the white of his shirt where it covered his back.
In his head, Purkiss screamed: No.
The pain in his groin and his belly roiled and twitched like a snake.
He stumbled forwards, over Donovan’s body where it lay sprawled and twisted, because Saburova was on the floor and the second guard was on top of her and straddling her and he had his hands around her throat and was leaning his full weight down and a move like that was usually fatal within seconds, ten at the most.
Purkiss slammed his knee into the side of the man’s head, the force of the blow weakened by the pain in his crotch but the effect enough to rock the man sideways and to release his grip on the woman’s throat. He seized the guard’s short hair and wrenched him completely off Saburova and drove his head, face-first, into the thinly carpeted floor, twice, three times, until the man slumped and stopped moving.
Purkiss stood up. He looked round at Saburova, who was hauling herself into a sitting position, coughing, her hands rubbing at her throat as if to erase the feeling of the hands pressing down on her windpipe.
He looked at the bodies on the floor. The unconscious guard closest to him. The bloodied corpses of the other guard and of Donovan.
He looked at Asher, who stood, his gun raised vertically with his other hand gripping that wrist, his face impassive.
‘How many outside?’
They were moving swiftly around the room, Purkiss at the shattered window, peering out into the night, Asher and Saburova searching the bodies on the floor.
‘Two men,’ Saburova said, without pausing. ‘I came to the gate after you had gone inside. I saw them, which is when I called you. I climbed over the gate and advanced. One of them saw me and opened up. I returned fire. One of them I dropped. The other disappeared round the side. I came in through the front door.’
‘So there’s at least one still out there.’ Purkiss said, ‘We need to move fast. Anything on them?’
Asher said. ‘No ID.’
Saburova stood up from Donovan’s body, a handset in her fist. ‘His phone.’
‘That’ll be useful.’ Purkiss picked up the laptop from the desk. He wondered, briefly, whether to wait for the police to arrive. He couldn’t hear any sirens, yet, but gunfire in an area like Richmond would attract attention sooner rather than later.
His instincts overrode the thought.
He said: ‘Let’s go.’
They emerged into the brightness of the forecourt, the spotlights still blazing, and ran down the driveway towards the gates. Asher was at the rear, his gun pointed back at the house, but nobody appeared.
They clambered over more quickly than it would have taken to activate the electronic mechanism to open the gates, and were at the car in the lay by in less than two minutes since they’d left the house.
Purkiss dropped into the driver’s seat, for no reason other than that he’d reached the car first.
He sat for a couple of seconds, aware of a gnawing sense of unease. Of things being not quite right.
At the corner of his eye, Asher’s face loomed, pale in the darkness.
‘That was a good kill,’ Asher said. His accent wasn’t quite American again, but it had slipped.
Purkiss turned his head to look at him.
‘Donovan,’ said Asher. ‘He would have shot me. I had no option. You know it.’
Purkiss thought of Donovan’s last word.
Wait.
At that point, Donovan had the upper hand.
It was, therefore, an odd thing to say.
The distant whine of sirens was by now making itself heard.
Purkiss fired the ignition and pulled out.
Sixteen
Rossiter stood on the lip of the broch, the Iron Age round tower which was such a characteristic sight in the Shetland Islands, and gazed out across the dark sea towards the mainland.
It was a precarious spot, and he had to adjust his balance continually, correcting for the wind that buffeted him in periodic squalls from the Atlantic to the west. But he’d been up here before, as a boy and later as a man, and he had a love for the location which time and bitter experience had failed to dim.
By turning his head a few degrees to the left, he could see the lights below, and the movement. He wasn’t particularly high up, but the hill sloped to create an effect of significant distance.
He’d worked relentlessly, mercilessly, for the last two hours, and now, as the final preparations were being put into place, he’d allowed himself the indulgence of wandering up here alone.
The mainland was invisible from here, and would remain so even with the use of a powerful telescope. But it was there, whether or not it could be seen, and somehow the fact that it was hidden from view made it all the more present.
My country.
Most people who claimed to be patriots, in Rossiter’s experience, didn’t have the remotest understanding of the meaning of the word. Whether British, or Irish, or American, when asked to explain their professed love for their nation, they tended to cite values such as liberty, or justice, or, God forbid, democracy.
Ideals, ways of organising society, came and went. But Rossiter had long ago understood that his bond with his land, the force that connected him to it through his very blood, was forged by nothing less than history.
He didn’t believe that any nation could inspire loyalty, genuine, visceral passion, if it was a new nation. The United States was a new nation, by any reasonable definition, and although it had more overtly patriotic people than any other he’d encountered, the whole thing had an ersatz feel, as fashionable and disposable as so much of the rest of the culture.
Now, gazing south-west from this spot at the very edge of the Arctic, Rossiter was almost overwhelmed by the weight of the life his country had lived.