He wished he’d had a chance to find Chelsea Barker. He hoped someone else would go looking.
And then the door burst off its hinges, and Sam’s hopes shut down.
The old man said, “Sir Bedivere.”
Moira Tregorian closed her eyes.
“Sir Kay.”
There was more gunfire from downstairs.
When Patrice kicked the door it almost came apart, the wood was so rotten. He stepped over its broken parts, shot Sam Chapman in the head, then checked the room, but it was otherwise unoccupied. The kitchen, too—a galley-space no bigger than a barge’s—was empty, though the other office door was closed. There would be targets behind it. He braced and kicked, the flat of his right foot hitting the door squarely.
This one held against his first assault, but wouldn’t withstand a second.
The door tried to pound its way into the room, and only just changed its mind. He’d kick once more, they knew, and be inside.
“Bullets?” Shirley said.
Catherine shook her head miserably.
JK Coe had blade in hand again, but it looked small and brittle; the wrong weapon for the occasion. He said, “Spread out. He might not get all of us.”
Catherine grabbed the first thing to hand, the keyboard from River’s desk, and yanked it from its cable. She wielded it two-handed, unsure whether she was preparing to hurl it or use it as a racquet, swat back the bullet he’d fire her way—
She thought:
The door splintered open.
“Sir Tristan,” the O.B. said. “Sir Bors, Sir Gareth.”
“Shut up!” Moira screamed. “Shut up shut up shut up!”
“They all died, you know,” the old man told her, unperturbed. “They started with such promise, but they all went the same way in the end.”
There was another crash from downstairs as another door bit the dust, and then there was more gunfire—two shots? Three? Enough of them, anyway, to silence the old man.
He looked her way, visions of long-ago knights put to rest.
A short while later, they heard someone climbing the last flight of stairs.
When the door fell Patrice planted himself in the doorway and levelled the gun. There were three targets: a man, two women. Choosing the order in which to drop them took no time—the shorter woman, who held a gun, was the threat; the man, who had a knife, would be next; the older woman, who appeared to be wielding a piece of office equipment, last. David Cartwright was not among their number, but Patrice knew from the earlier commotion that there were more people upstairs. He sensed that the woman’s gun was empty, because there was fear in her eyes, and she did not look like someone who would be scared holding a loaded gun. Microseconds, these thoughts took. Less. It was part of what he’d learned at Les Arbres, in its woods and in its cellars; that you measured a situation in the moment you became part of it, and that what you did next was less action than response—you became part of the inevitable: that was what he had been taught. What would happen next was fixed from the moment he’d kicked the door down. All that remained was for the bodies to hit the floor. He aimed at the young woman and pulled the trigger, and in his mind was already turning to fire at the man, was already aware that the other woman had thrown a keyboard at him, and that he would turn and shoot her too before it reached him; and all of this was inevitable up to the moment that the whisky bottle flung by Jackson Lamb from the stairwell smashed into his temple, throwing his aim off—he fired three times, but his bullets bit air, bit glass, bit plaster. He landed on top of the broken door, and for a moment, all was quiet.
She took each set of stairs in a single leap; would have broken an ankle, a leg, a neck, if she’d noticed what she was doing. But there was no plan driving her, simply an imperative; an impulse that carried her to the doorway of her office, where it failed her. She had to reach out to its frame for support, and take several breaths before taking her next step.
The room was much as Shirley had left it. Her PC, never the quietest of beasts, was humming to itself, awaiting instructions. The steamed-up windows were weeping; the carpet was rucked. Marcus, though. Marcus was different. Marcus sat behind his desk, but had been thrown back against the wall, his chair balanced on two legs like an animal performing a party trick. His eyes were open. There was a hole in his forehead. There was a mess on the wall behind him.
On the floor, next to him, a gun. He’d got one shot off, but had only killed his desk.
Shirley waited for this scene to change, but it didn’t. When there was a noise at her back she knew it was Ho, emerging from a hiding place.
“You’re alive,” she said, without turning round.
“Uh-huh.”
His voice didn’t sound familiar, but then neither did hers.
He said, “I hung out the window. I nearly fell.”
She didn’t reply.
After a while he said, “What about Marcus?”
