He said, “Patrice?” again, making it a question. “Patrice? You don’t want to do anything foolish now.”
Given that Patrice’s most recent exploit had involved engineering a car-smash on a busy London road, this didn’t carry as much weight as River might have hoped. So he stepped forward and stretched an arm out in front of the woman. Speaking of foolish things: this would stop a bullet like the butter stops a knife.
He said, “It’s not what Yevgeny would want.”
“. . . Who are you?”
“Tell him to put the gun down. The nasty squad’ll be here any second.” This was the blonde, sounding preternaturally calm. Rain had plastered her hair to her skull: River knew women for whom that alone would cause hysterics, forget the car crash and the gun.
But her intervention wasn’t helping.
“Shut up,” he told her. Then, to Patrice, “She’s right, though. You’ve got less than a minute.”
“Twenty seconds,” she said. “Max.”
Which, thought River, wasn’t as comforting as she appeared to think—once the police arrived, the last place you wanted to be was next to anyone holding a gun. For a force that prided itself on being unarmed, the Met had racked up an impressive number of civilian casualties lately. True, you had to include all the unshot suspects to get a fair picture, but that was best done on the sidelines, not in open range.
And he really wanted to hear Patrice’s story before the pair of them were cut down in the street.
“Who are you?” Patrice repeated.
“Adam Lockhead,” River said.
The name cut a groove through Patrice’s expression. “No. Where’s Bertrand? And why . . . ”
Sirens nearly here. Though it was the ones you didn’t hear you had to worry about: they’d be flattening themselves behind car cover; sighting on the three of them from somewhere overhead.
The same thought must have struck Patrice. He lowered the gun. “Okay. We’re leaving.”
“We?” the blonde woman said, and at the same moment Patrice—his motion so fluid, he might have been an eel passing through water—jabbed her in the throat with his free hand. She dropped without making a sound. That would come later.
River swung a punch, which for some reason hit Patrice not on the side of the head, which was where he’d been aiming, but in his open palm, which closed round River’s fist and squeezed so hard he felt it in his toes.
Patrice spoke so calmly he might have been choosing fruit. “We. You and me. Or I’ll kill you here.”
Which sounded like he was reserving the option to do this elsewhere later, but River didn’t see he had a choice.
“There,” Patrice said, pointing through the blocked traffic towards a narrow street where a crowd still loitered—though they scattered when Patrice fired a shot over their heads.
Then he found himself running, Patrice on his heels, and behind them the noise grew muted: the keening of sirens, pulsing through the rain; the blaring of the traffic, still trying to work out what had happened; and the gasping of a blonde woman on her knees in the road, learning the hard way how to breathe again.
Some while ago, Shirley had constructed a wall chart based on those signs you see on entrances to building sites:
She did this now before slumping into her chair. It was past home-time—and the slow horses didn’t so much keep office hours as nurture and cherish them—but today wasn’t ordinary, and no one was ready to leave. There was a reason she had joined the Service, and if much of the original impulse had been smothered under Jackson Lamb’s tutelage, it could yet be sparked into life by the feeling that something big was happening; something that promised action, and excluded her.
Like this, for instance—the Google alerts popping into her inbox.
“Are you seeing this?” she asked.
She was talking to Marcus. Louisa was still there—her feet in a washing-up bowl, like a character in a ’70s sit-com—but her eyes were closed and she didn’t respond. Nor did Marcus, immediately. He was intent on his monitor, and Shirley could tell by his scowl was either regretting a poor judgement call at an online casino or looking at his bank account. Lately, Marcus had been having money troubles—that was putting it mildly. Lately, Marcus and money had been undergoing a trial separation. And things didn’t look good for them. Before long, Shirley guessed, money was going to be heading out the door for good; was going to walk out on Marcus, and leave him all alone in the world, except for his wife and kids.
And he persisted in thinking she was the one with problems.
“Seeing what?” he said, without looking up.
Her alerts included “armed terrorist London.”
“YouTube,” she said. “Holy fuck! Is that River?”
