Джеймс Паттерсон: Revenge

“She was going to get to you next.”

“That’s why she called me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Guy said that you were gutted that Emma had called me and not you. But that was why, wasn’t it? Not because she turned to me for support, a final cry for help. Just because she needed to tell me about Karen.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Maybe Susie would feel better knowing that, but he doubted it. He wanted to tell her that he’d started off needing to know the truth himself, but it was no consolation now that he did. It didn’t bring Emma back. If anything it made it worse, knowing that she might have found her way out of the hole she was in, given the time that Karen took from her.

They fell back into silence. Eventually she said, “I’m sorry, Shelley.”

“You’ve got no reason to be sorry.”

“I do. For what happened all those years ago.”

He knew exactly what she meant. “It wasn’t just you. It was me too.”

“Was it?”

“You know it was.”

“Could anything have happened between us?” she asked.

“No, Susie,” said Shelley. “I love Lucy.”

“It broke Emma’s heart that you left.”

“But I did have to go,” he told her.

“I know,” she said, adding, “I met Lucy.”

“Of course.”

“She’s beautiful,” Susie said. “Beautiful and tough and clever. What on earth do you see in her?”

He chuckled, but the laughter died in his throat as it hit him why the Chechens hadn’t met them at the DLR station at South Quay. Why Dmitry was so fucking calm.

They were going after Lucy.

CHAPTER 66

LYING IN HER bed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Lucy Shelley awoke with a start, instantly needing to use the toilet.

“Oh, bollocks,” she muttered. Even on a good day, the last thing she wanted to do was get up at three in the morning for a pee.

She lay there for a while, thinking that the urge might just disappear. Why did she always do that? It wasn’t going to.

Okay , she decided, there was no point in denying it. She had to get out of bed, whether she liked it or not.

Christ, it was hard enough at the best of times. Like at home, where it was relatively warm and she hadn’t just been shot—well, most days at least—but here, this was going to hurt. She braced herself for the pain and the cold and then moved one leg out of bed. She’d always had the impression that hospitals were supposed to be warm places, overheated almost, but this one certainly wasn’t, and she was very glad now that she wore a pair of pajama bottoms over her bandages. She thought fondly of Shelley, who’d gone home and made up a bag for her before he came hurtling round to the hospital. She wondered what he was up to. Whether the exchange had gone well. Hoped he was okay.

Her bare feet touched the cold floor of her hospital room. “Ouch, ouch,” she gasped. All those years in hostile environments and here she was, defeated by a cold floor. She tiptoed across the room to the toilet. “En suite bathroom,” she’d scoffed earlier.

“We do that for all our gunshot wound cases who have their own private guard,” a doctor had told her drily.

“Remind me to get shot more often,” Lucy had replied, unsure if she was flirting or not. Probably not, on balance.

Close to her “en suite bathroom” was the door to her room, beneath it a sliver of light from the corridor outside. Her guard was a guy called Trevor. She’d struck up quite a relationship with him in the few hours she had been there and saw no reason not to peek outside and say hello now. She was, after all, wearing pajamas.

When she did manage to hobble over to look, however, his seat was empty. Just a copy of that day’s Daily Mirror , but no sign of Trevor. Opposite was the men’s room. Must be in there , she decided. She cast a glance up and down the corridor. The lights were slightly dimmed and there wasn’t a soul to be seen, the only sound a far-off moaning of some poor soul needing attention.

She stood there for a moment, maybe half hoping Trevor might reappear. But he didn’t, and it was cold, and she needed a pee, so Later, Trevor .

She hobbled back into her room and closed the door gently. Then she turned to the bathroom, letting herself in. The light flickered on.

Still bleary, it took her a second or so to work out what was obscuring her view of the white porcelain of the loo that she really rather desperately needed to use.

It was a man. He wore leather gloves and a black denim jacket. He held a pistol fitted with a suppressor, and it was pointed at her.

CHAPTER 67

SHELLEY HAD TAKEN the opportunity to try Lucy’s mobile before the DLR train went underground, but it was off. Of course it was off, she was in the bloody hospital; there was no other way of contacting her unless he intended to ring the switchboard, who would want to know why he planned to wake his wife in the middle of the night, and might not like it when he told them that armed Chechens were on their way to kidnap her.

If, of course, they even were.

Because why would Dmitry even consider Lucy a target? He didn’t know she was Shelley’s wife. Johnson was dead when all that kicked off. When Shelley spoke to Dmitry in the hospital, the Chechen was none the wiser.

Which meant that he had learned something in the meantime. In other words, from somebody other than Johnson.

And that was when it struck him, the thing that had been bugging him. The smoothness of the operation. The fact that Dmitry had always seemed to be one step ahead of him.

They had an inside man.

Not Johnson. They had another inside man.

“Come on.” Susie’s voice yanked him from his thoughts. By now they were at Bank, which was surprisingly busy for the hour. Late-night drinkers and clubbers gave it a boisterous, raucous air.

Shelley and Susie hustled onward, taking the tunnels toward the Central line where they boarded another train. This one was busier, full of even more exuberant youngsters: drunk and shouting and laughing way too loudly. Shelley and Susie kept their heads down and were delivered to Holborn, where they disembarked.

And then Shelley saw him: a tall guy with that look of Chechen danger that made it 100 percent certain he wasn’t a clubber. How long had he been on their tail? Shelley wasn’t sure. Neither could he be certain if he was one of the same men present at the exchange in Millharbour.

They were closer to the center of the city now, and there were more revelers on the trains, so that when Shelley looked back he could no longer see the guy following. For a moment he wondered if it was just his imagination, or perhaps they had lost him.

But when he next checked he saw another face—and this one he recognized.

It was the inside man. The traitor. It was Gurney. He was the one who knew enough to feed the Chechens with information. And of course he must have informed them about Lucy.

Gurney, you fucking rat , thought Shelley. The ex-Para was some way back, using as cover a throng of partygoers haphazardly making their way along the tunnel. He had risked a look just as Shelley glanced back and the two men had seen one another. The game was up. The mole was out in the open. For a second it looked as though Gurney would try to hide his face, but he knew he’d been seen. Instead, as their eyes met across the noisy crowd of people, a grin appeared, and it was as though the mask that Gurney wore, which had only occasionally slipped before, was finally discarded for good.

“We’re being followed,” he told Susie urgently. “You have to speed up. Use the crowd, thread in and out, shove a few of this lot if necessary. We need to build up a lead.”