Villiers stared at him, then at Dreyfuss. Finally he brought his gun arm down, but then angled it away from Dreyfuss and his prisoner and began raising it again. Directly at Jilly’s head.
‘I think,’ he said stonily, ‘this is what’s called an impasse. Except that you, Major, can do nothing with your hostage except hide behind him. While I, on the other hand, won’t hesitate to shoot mine.’
And to prove it, he turned his head away from Dreyfuss towards Jilly, taking aim and beginning to squeeze the trigger.
‘No!’ Dreyfuss pushed Fagin aside and started forward again. But he was too far away from Villiers, far too far away. The gun moved in an easy sweep until it was pointed directly at him. The explosion in such a confined space was deafening, but the impact in Dreyfuss’ chest was silent. He felt himself propelled backwards with great force, until, with a new and sickening sound of shattering glass, he slammed into and through one of the dividing walls.
Shards sparkled in his hair as he lay on the floor, a red stain spreading rapidly across his shirt. Villiers examined him through the sizeable hole in the glass wall, seemingly content, then turned back into the room. Fagin looked ghostly white, smoothing strands of hair back across his gleaming pate. And Jilly Watson... well, she was staring at Dreyfuss’ still body with wide, tear-brimming eyes and horror carved into her cheekbones. Seeing this, Villiers smiled at her with a face that seemed to be transfigured before her very eyes, becoming quite mad and more dangerous, even, than ever.
But now Villiers’ attention was drawn to Fagin. ‘Don’t just stand there!’ he roared. ‘Get to work! Let’s see who stops Martin Hepton first: you with your computer, or Harry with her gun.’
There was chaos in the control room. Some of the men had risen from their consoles to stare wide-eyed at Harry, and more especially, at the gun she was pointing in Hepton’s face. A few onlookers, caught between one desk and another, had frozen where they stood, while others had slipped out of the room. Harry didn’t appear to see any of this. She had eyes only for Hepton. He was still seated at his computer but had taken his hands off the keyboard and placed them either side of it. His left hand rested on the desktop, his right hand on Nick Christopher’s heavy dictionary.
‘I can’t believe,’ Harry was saying, ‘you thought you could just walk in here.’
‘Why not?’ said Hepton. ‘You did, after all.’
She didn’t seem particularly angry or vengeful or confident or nervous. She seemed... relaxed. A job was a job, and this was just another one. Hepton took pleasure in the scars across her face, the result of his boiling water.
‘Now look,’ Nick Christopher said from somewhere behind Hepton’s shoulder. ‘You can’t just come in here waving a bloody gun—’
‘Don’t waste your breath, Nick,’ said Hepton. His fingers had closed around the book under his right hand.
‘That’s right,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t waste your breath.’
Hepton swallowed hard. He had one last card. ‘I was sorry to learn about your mother,’ he said.
Harry’s eyes widened, then narrowed to slits. ‘What?’
‘Your mother,’ Hepton repeated casually. ‘I was sorry to learn that she committed suicide. Something to do with your father, wasn’t it?’
‘Shut up.’
‘He was in the army, wasn’t he? I find that odd, you see.’ He paused.
‘You find what odd?’
‘That you should end up working for the military, working for everything your father stood for. Yet he was so brutal to your mother, to Harriet.’
‘Shut up!’
‘That was why you left home, wasn’t it? Did the old drunkard like to give you a beating too, eh?’
It was enough. Harry’s teeth were bared in absolute, mindless hate. She swung back the pistol and whipped it across Hepton’s face. As it connected, he brought up his left hand and gripped Harry’s pistol hand, her left hand, angling the gun away from him, while his right hand, now clutching the dictionary, swiped at her head, connecting heavily. The gun went off, its deadly charge hammering home into a computer screen, which sparked once before starting to smoke.
Hepton rose from his chair and placed one foot on the seat, using it as a springboard to launch himself over the desk, the computer, the monitor screen, landing heavily on Harry. His left hand still clutched her gun arm, while his right flexed and sent a clenched fist hard into her face. The contact was satisfying. She gasped, writhing beneath his weight. He could feel blood trickling down his cheek from where the pistol barrel had hit him. Then Harry’s knee connected with his groin, and he felt searing pain. He retched, but held fast to her arm, and punched her again, in the mouth this time. But she was wrenching free of him, kicking out, and scrabbling with her free hand towards his face, his hair, his eyes...
Her nails were like tools as they raked down his already bloodied cheek, digging into flesh. He cried out and pulled away from her hand. She used the moment to kick again with her full weight, sending him flying into a desk. People were pouring from the room, not about to lend a hand. Even Nick Christopher seemed rooted to the spot, his eyes on the pistol. The pistol she was raising again, aiming. Blood dripped from Hepton’s face onto the stone floor. His skin felt on fire. He prepared himself for a final assault, while four feet away Harry stood, blood flowing from nose and mouth, her trigger finger squeezing...
‘Bastard,’ she screeched. ‘No more!’
‘Harry!’
She froze at the sound of the voice. Her gun still trained on Hepton, her eyes peered towards the far door, where another gun was trained on her.
‘Parfit!’ she spat, arcing the pistol towards the door. But too late: Parfit’s bullet hit home with a wet sound like an overripe peach hitting a wall. An inky pink spray covered Hepton as Harry fell back, her head crashing against a computer screen, cracking it, then her body sliding floorwards in a clumsy, ungainly mess. And there she lay, the gun still in her hand, but like nothing so much as a toy now, a rag doll with too little stuffing. Inelegant, and not at all tidy.
There were shouts, panic, pandemonium. Parfit didn’t care, didn’t bother identifying himself. He walked over to Hepton.
‘Have you finished?’ he asked. His eyes strayed momentarily to the corpse.
‘What?’ Hepton was still in shock, still reeling from a great feeling of being alive.
‘Whatever it is that you’re doing here.’
‘Oh.’ He was jolted back to the present. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not quite.’
‘Then get on with it.’ Parfit looked around. ‘Where’s Dreyfuss?’
‘He’s gone off to look for Jilly.’
‘Right.’ Parfit handed him a clean handkerchief. ‘Here, mop some of that blood off your face.’ As he stalked off, Nick Christopher slumped weeping into a swivel chair, covering sticky red face with sticky red hands. Hepton looked towards Parfit’s retreating figure.
‘What took you so long?’ he called with a grin, before walking back around the row of consoles to his own screen, where, numbly but fixedly, he began to go to work. ‘Nick,’ he said, ‘I need your help.’
Nick Christopher rubbed at his eyes. His voice was hollow. ‘What do you want me to do?’
Hepton pointed to the computer console next to his own. ‘Get that thing up and running. Do you remember that TV satellite we hacked into a couple of months back, so we could get the porn channel?’
‘Yes.’ Christopher looked uncomprehending.
‘Good, get me back into it, will you?’
Fagin stared at the screen. Villiers was growing ever more agitated beside him.
‘What’s happening?’ he snarled.