Blood trickled from his mouth, his eyes glazed, and he slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Chapter 26
A FEW MINUTES later, Knight stood on the pavement outside One Aldwych, oblivious to patrons hurrying past him to the restaurants and theatres. He was transfixed by the sight and sound of the wailing ambulance speeding Guilder and Mascolo to the nearest hospital.
He remembered standing on another pavement late at night almost three years before, watching a different ambulance race away from him, its siren’s fading cry accompanying a feeling of misery that still had not lifted entirely for him.
‘Knight?’ Pope said. She’d come up behind him.
He blinked and noticed the double-decker buses braking and taxis honking and people hurrying home all around him. Suddenly he felt disjointed in much the same way that he had on that long-ago night when he’d watched the other ambulance speed away from him.
London goes on, he thought. London always went on even in the face of tragedy and death, whether the victim was a corrupt hedge fund manager or a bodyguard or a young—
A pair of fingers appeared in front of his nose. They clicked and he looked round, startled. Karen Pope was looking at him in annoyance. ‘Earth to Knight. Hello?’
‘What is it?’ he snapped.
‘I asked you if you think Guilder will make it?’
Knight shook his head. ‘No. I felt his spirit leave him.’
The reporter looked at him sceptically. ‘What do you mean, you felt it?’
Knight sighed softly before replying: ‘That’s the second time in my life I’ve had someone die in my arms, Pope. I felt it the first time, too. That ambulance might as well slow down. Guilder is as dead as Mascolo is.’
Pope’s shoulders sank a little and there was a brief awkward silence before she said, ‘I’d better be going back to the office. I’ve got a nine o’clock deadline.’
‘You should include in your story that Guilder confessed to the currency fraud just before he died,’ Knight said.
‘He did?’ Pope said, digging in her pocket for her notebook. ‘What’d he say, exactly?’
‘He said that the scam was his, and that the money did not go to any member of the Olympic Site Selection committee. It went to his personal offshore accounts. Marshall was innocent. He died a victim of Guilder’s scheming.’
Pope stopped writing, her scepticism back. ‘I don’t buy that,’ she said. ‘He’s covering for Marshall.’
‘They were his last words,’ Knight shot back. ‘I believe him.’
‘You have a reason to, don’t you? It clears your mother’s late fiancé.’
‘It’s what he said,’ Knight insisted. ‘You have to include that in the story.’
‘I’ll let the facts speak for themselves,’ Pope said, ‘including what you say Guilder told you.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get going.’
‘We’re not going anywhere soon,’ Knight said, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘Scotland Yard will want to talk with us, especially because there was gunfire. Meanwhile, I need to call Jack and fill him in, and then speak to my nanny.’
‘Nanny?’ Pope said, looking surprised. ‘You have kids?’
‘Twins. Boy and girl.’
Pope glanced at his left hand and said in a joking manner, ‘No ring. What, are you divorced? Drove your wife nuts and she left you with the brats?’
Knight gazed at her coldly, marvelling at her insensitivity, before saying, ‘I’m a widower, Pope. My wife died in childbirth. She bled to death in my arms two years, eleven months and two weeks ago. They took her away in an ambulance with the siren wailing just like that.’
Pope’s jaw sagged and she looked horrified. ‘Peter, I’m so sorry, I …’
But Knight already had his back turned and was walking along the pavement towards Inspector Elaine Pottersfield, who’d only just arrived.
Chapter 27
DARKNESS FALLS ON London, and my old friend hatred stirs at the thought that my entire life has all been a prelude to this fated moment, exactly twenty-four hours before the opening ceremony of the most hypocritical event on Earth.
It heats in my gut as I turn to my sisters. We’re in my office. It’s the first chance the four of us have had to talk face to face in days, and I take the three of them in at a glance.
Blonde and cool Teagan is removing the scarf, hat and sunglasses she wore while driving the taxi earlier in the day. Marta, ebony-haired and calculating, sets her motorcycle helmet on the floor beside her pistol and unzips her leathers. Pretty Petra is the youngest, the most attractive, the best actor and therefore the most impulsive. She looks in the mirror on the closet door, checking the fit of a chic grey cocktail dress and the dramatic styling of her short ginger hair.
Seeing the sisters like this, they’re each so familiar to me that it’s hard to imagine a time when we weren’t all together, establishing and projecting our own busy lives, while staying completely unaligned in public.
And why wouldn’t they still be with me after seventeen years? In absentia in 1997, a tribunal in The Hague indicted them for executing more than sixty Bosnians. Ever since Ratko Mladic – the general who oversaw the Serbian kill squads in Bosnia – was arrested last year, the hunt for my Furies has intensified.
I know. I keep track of such things. My dreams depend on it.
In any case, the sisters have lived under the threat of discovery for so long that it pervades their DNA, but that constant cellular-level menace has made them all the more fanatically devoted to me, mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Indeed, ever so gradually over the years, my dreams of vengeance have become theirs, along with a desire to see those dreams realised that burns almost as incandescently as my own.
Over the years, in addition to protecting them, I’ve educated them, paid for minor plastic surgery, and trained them to be expert marksmen, hand-to-hand fighters, con artists and thieves. These last two skills have paid me back tenfold on my investment, but that is another story altogether. Suffice it to say that, to the best of my knowledge, they are the best at shadow games, superior to anyone save me.
Now the jaded might be wondering whether I am similar to Charles Manson back in the 1970s, an insane prophet who rescued traumatised women and convinced them that they were apostles sent to Earth for homicidal missions designed to trigger Armageddon. But comparing me to Manson and the Furies to the Helter-Skelter girls is deeply misguided, like trying to compare a true story to a myth of heaven. We are more powerful, transcendent and deadly than Manson could ever have imagined in his wildest drug-induced nightmares.
Teagan pours a glass of vodka, gulps it down, and says, ‘I could not have anticipated that man jumping in front of my cab.’
‘Peter Knight – he works for Private London,’ I say, and then push across the coffee table a photograph that I found on the Internet. In it Knight stands, drink in hand, beside his mother at the launch of her most recent fashion line.
Teagan considers the photograph and then nods. ‘That’s him. I got a good look when his face smashed against my windscreen.’
Marta frowns, picks up the photograph, studies it, and then trains her dark agate eyes on me. ‘He was with Guilder too, just now, in the bar, before I shot. I’m sure of it. He shot at me after I killed the one guarding Guilder too.’
I raise an eyebrow. Private? Knight? They’ve almost foiled my plans twice today. Is that fate, coincidence, or a warning?