Джеймс Паттерсон: Revenge

Indeed, when she next spoke she sounded uncertain. “I’m sorry to tell you, my dear, that one of the men loyal to me has killed Dedushka this very evening. I gave the order with Sergei’s blessing.”

Once more Dmitry’s response took her by surprise.

He smiled.

And then laughed, throwing back his head and guffawing into the night as everybody looked on.

At last his mirth died. “No,” he said. “No, I’m sorry, Karen, but you don’t understand. It is I who gives the orders around here.” He raised his hand. In response, the two men at the Cherokee moved to the boot, opened it, and reached inside, struggling with something that took two of them to remove.

Shelley knew it was a body. He knew it was a body as soon as the boot was open. Out it came, covered in black plastic and badly applied packing tape. The two men brought it close to where Dmitry, Karen, and Sergei stood and then dropped it with a thump to the ground.

Karen looked sharply at one of them. “I said nothing about bringing the body here.”

“Again, no, Karen,” said Dmitry with a kind of patient sympathy you reserve for a child who can’t grasp a simple math problem. “It is not what you think it is. This, my dear, is my present to you. The order to kill Dedushka —you may think you gave it, Karen. But I did. I hated my grandfather.”

Karen had been looking at the man she considered one of her own, her assassin, with wide disbelieving eyes, the eyes of somebody watching their plan unravel. The man returned her gaze impassively. His expression remained unchanged even when Dmitry strolled over and threw an arm around his shoulders, beaming with pride.

At that, Karen looked as though she wanted to be sick. Her gun hand began to shake, and her gaze flicked to Sergei, who until mere moments ago she’d considered her ally, her co-conspirator.

All Sergei said to her was “And I hated my brother.”

One of Dmitry’s men—because of course they were all Dmitry’s men—stepped forward. A Stanley knife clicked. He slashed open the plastic, slicing too hard, so that as the black fell away, they saw that he had slashed the face of the fresh corpse beneath.

Even so, judging by Karen’s reaction, there was no doubt who it was.

Malcolm Regan.

CHAPTER 62

IN THE DISTANCE a DLR train trundled past on its elevated rail. Canary Wharf’s aircraft warning light blinked implacably. And Karen Regan looked down at the body of her late father, at the line of freshly parted skin on his face. No blood, almost as though his flesh had been unzipped.

“Sergei told me everything, Karen,” said Dmitry. “How you tried to enlist him in a plot against me, thinking he might want to avenge his brother. But of course you hadn’t told him the whole truth, had you? And so for that I needed to listen in on your conversation with Mrs. Drake. Very interesting. What planning. What cunning.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, raising his voice, “when we look back and wonder how all this began, we need only look at my wife, Karen, for it is she who killed Emma Drake and brought the wrath of her father upon us. Should I be thanking her or should I be cursing her? Do you know, I really cannot decide.”

But if Karen was even listening to her husband she made no sign. Instead she stared in horror and disbelief at the corpse on the tarmac. “Daddy,” she said, and the harsh headlights seemed to accentuate her pallor as the blood drained from her face.

A ripple ran through those present. Shelley could have sworn he heard one of the men giggle. Even Susie Drake seemed to be watching with an ugly fascination.

And for perhaps ten seconds that was how Karen stood. Statue-like. Absolutely stock-still. Almost as though she was gathering the strength for a primal howl of grief.

Maybe Dmitry and the Chechens thought so, too, and had been hoping to savor this moment. Perhaps they’d expected a more visceral and therefore less decisive reaction from Karen.

But, if so, they’d underestimated her. Because Karen was a killer, a survivor—she was her father’s daughter—and in the instant that she had seen his body on the ground she’d realized she only had one option.

To switch sides.

Shelley was her ally now.

She caught his eye, and he was the only one not taken by surprise by what she did next.

“ Run! ” she called, and then she jinked to the side and twisted, her coat billowing and her bad right arm raised for balance as she put two well-grouped shots into a man who stood behind her, who jerked as though punched, spitting blood as he fell.

Men bellowed in Russian. Guns were raised. And it should have been a shooting gallery but for the fact that the Chechens flanked their enemy on both sides and risked hitting each other. For a precious second confusion and hesitancy reigned, enough time for Shelley to pull Susie out of the line of fire an eyeblink before the shooting began.

And then it did begin.

Rounds whistled past. There was the familiar thump of bullet hitting body. Karen screamed, and in the half-light Shelley saw that half her face was torn away as she dropped to her knees, Beretta held two-handed, still firing off shots.

Shelley’s own gun was drawn, and in the next instant they were plunged into near darkness as his first two shots took out the Cherokee’s headlights. Using the sudden darkness and Karen’s gunfire as cover, he manhandled Susie to the side of the road, away from the bullets.

Karen was screaming—“Fuck you!”—and blasting indiscriminately. The Chechens were trying to return fire but still worried about hitting each other, trying not to get killed in the process.

And then, as Shelley and Susie reached the edge of the road, Karen’s mag emptied and she was firing dry.

A flashlight came on, highlighting Karen, who knelt with most of her face gone, snarling and pulling the trigger uselessly. Regrouping, the Chechens picked her out, pouring rounds into her.

Karen knelt in a mist of blood, her jerking body held upright by the bullets that tore into her, until at last she fell.

CHAPTER 63

SHELLEY AND SUSIE dashed into the car park of the burned-out Foxy Kittenz, using the blackened shell of the building as cover and heading toward the rear, past the charcoal-colored brickwork to a walkway with the river ahead of them.

For a second Shelley dithered over which direction to take. They’d expect him to make for the car. Sorry, Lucy . Her beloved Mini was going to have to be sacrificed. “This way,” he whispered harshly, pulling Susie in the opposite direction.

As they set off, he thought about the options open to the enemy. The Cherokee was no good to them, not without headlights. Unless they fancied piling into Lucy’s Mini, their only transportation was the black Transit. Plus they were in disarray. With no transport of his own, he had to hope that would be enough.

“When was the last time you did any running?” said Susie, sprinting at his side. He hadn’t done any for months. He’d taken it up after Frankie died, but it had never really been his thing and he was feeling it now. A burning in his chest. “Okay, then,” she said, “slow down, take it easy, set a steady pace, and keep to it. Come on.”

They slowed, Susie setting the pace. Then about fifty yards ahead he saw the station. Docklands Light Railway. Crossharbour. The line would take them back into town.

Moments later they’d climbed the stairs and stood getting their breath back. The platform towered over the road beneath, as though on a steel gantry, and Shelley peered through rain-streaked Perspex to keep an eye out for a vehicle below.

According to an information display, the next train, the last of the night, was just two minutes away.