Quintin Jardine - Gallery Whispers

Hawkins was behind the wheel, Ventnor was in the front passenger seat, while the third man sat in the back. She stood directly in front of the vehicle, her pistol levelled at a point between them so that she could react to any sudden movement. 'Out!' she called again. 'This is loaded, the safety's off, and I will fire.'

Her lover grinned at her, as he opened his door, calmly and stepped out. On the other side, Hawkins did the same. He no longer wore his heavy glasses, and for the first time she caught a resemblance to the man in the photographs she had been shown weeks before.

'You're not going to shoot me, Karen, love,' Wayne drawled. She saw that he was holding a small box in his right hand.

'Don't bet your life on it, you bastard. Right in the balls if I have to. The other man: I want him out too.'

'Shapoor's harmless, love. Don't you worry about him. Old Hencke and me, we're the dangerous ones. Now just you stand aside and let us drive on out of here.'

'No way.'

He held up the box in his right hand, and pressed downwards with his thumb. She frowned for a moment, then gasped in horror as a compressed, booming, rolling sound came from within the Conference Centre. 'You're too late, Karen,' he said, still smiling as he dropped the box. 'The rest of the Iranian delegation is cosmic fucking dust by now, the Paddies, the Israelis and every one else for yards around them have all bought it. Within an hour there will be a new Government in Iran and a whole new Middle Eastern power structure.

'That's if there's any Middle East left. Sometime in the next thirty minutes CNN will have a call from a so-called Iraqi source claiming responsibility. There's a fair chance they'll take Baghdad right out in response.'

His smile disappeared, and a look which might have been a plea came into his eyes. 'Now, come on, stand aside and let us drive out of here. You've been a great help to us, so far. Don't screw it up now, otherwise Hencke might have to break his promise to me.' She realised that the man she had known as Crombie was holding a gun, and in the fraction of a second which it took her to register the fact, Wayne's right hand came into view and she saw that he had one also.

'Please, Karen,' he said, 'do the sensible thing. Like I said, we both know you can't shoot me.'

'No, but I can.' The voice calm and deadly.

Twenty yards away, Andy Martin stood, barely in their line of sight, his pistol drawn and aimed. Instinctively the two bombers looked towards him. Wayne's right arm moved: and that was it.

Martin fired twice, inside a second, both shots hitting Ventnor in the middle of the forehead. In the same moment, Karen swung her pistol on to Hawkins and pulled the trigger. Only once, but it was enough; her bullet took out his right eye and exited through the back of his head.

The Iranian inside the car screamed and raised his hands. 'Out, out, out!' she yelled at him.

As the man opened the back door and threw himself on to the ground, the chief superintendent was aware of another cry. Softer, terrified, female. He turned towards its source as she stared at the figures on the ground, at the spreading pools of blood.

'What the hell are you doing here, Estelle?' he shouted.

'I slipped our escorts,' the little journalist whispered. 'I wanted to find out who you really were.'

He frowned, grimly, as he re-holstered his pistol. 'Well, now you know. I told you to stick with me if you wanted a scoop… if they let you tell the story, that is.'

'How is Mr Skinner?' Karen asked. 'I heard they took him away in an ambulance, but nothing after that.'

'He's fine,' Martin replied. 'He was knocked out for a few seconds when his head hit the deck, that's all. Bob's had tougher scrapes than that and walked away from them. Sure, someone called for an ambulance, but the big fella sent it back empty.

'More to the point,' he continued, 'how are you? How was your interview with the Fiscal this afternoon? Did it go all right?'

'Yes. Mr Pettigrew was very kind. I've always imagined that when you… when something like that happened, the officer involved would be really heavily questioned.'

'Sometimes. Depends who's doing the questioning. Davie's a good guy; plus the boss had a word with him before he saw either of us. He was fine with me as well.'

'What worries me, sir'

He raised a hand and glanced around their surroundings. He had brought her to the Rosebum Bar because it was sufficiently far from the West End to be journalist-free. 'Listen, up the road, discipline says it has to be "sir", but in here, it's Andy.'

She smiled. 'Okay. What worries me, Andy, is that I didn't prevent that bastard from triggering the bomb.'

'How could you have done that?'

'I could have shot him as soon as he stepped out of the car.'

'Sure you could. Suppose you had done just that, and he'd been unarmed, the box had turned out to be Smarties, and Estelle, a foreign journalist desperate for a story, had happened on the scene — to find you with a smoking gun in your hand, standing over the body of the guy who'd let you down.

'Not even Bob would have been able to keep the Fiscal off your neck then.'

She shuddered at the thought. 'What about Estelle?' she asked. 'I thought you were seeing her tonight.'

'Not tonight, or any other,' he chuckled. 'She's gone running off to talk to an agent about syndicating her story. It'll be worth a million to her.'

'She doesn't know about Wayne and me, does she?'

'No way does she know about that; nor will anyone outside our force, ever, not even Pettigrew. Estelle knows what she saw and what I told her…' He paused.

'.. that the two dead men were international terrorists hired by an Iranian dissident group angered by their government's softening line towards the West. That Shapoor Bahwazi, the third man in the car, an attache with the Iranian delegation, was one of its ringleaders. That their first objective was to kill the Iranian Prime Minister, but that the way the seating plan worked out they extended it to include taking out the Israelis.'

'What's happened to Bahwazi?'

Martin smiled, coldly. 'The Prime Minister, no less, ordered him expelled from the UK this afternoon and flown back to Teheran. That way, there'll be no fuss, and no high security trial on our patch. He'll be up against a wall within a week, after they've got the other names in his group out of him. You'll probably catch the execution on CNN.

They had their telephoned communique, by the way, but by that time the CIA had warned them off broadcasting it.

'By then of course, they'd already run the story, as had everyone else, of the explosion in the Conference Centre, made safe by the boss.'

She sighed, heavily. 'I still blame myself for that; in spite of what you said.'

'And I'll say it again, until you accept it. You've got nothing to blame yourself for, except maybe for charging out there to tackle two dangerous guys on your own. Look, Wayne didn't give you any warning, he just triggered the bomb… which by that time was in a safe area, thanks to Bob. No, Karen, you did great.'

'But I couldn't shoot him, Andy,' she protested. 'It was my duty, and I couldn't do it. If you hadn't turned up'

'No, it wasn't your duty at all; there were no civilians about. It was your life alone that was at risk, and you had three options open to you … if you had been on your own.'

She frowned as she sipped her lager. 'What were they?'

'One, you could have let Hawkins kill you. Unacceptable. Two, you could have stood aside and let them go. Understandable. Three, you could have shot Hawkins in the hope that Wayne couldn't bring himself to kill you either. As it turned out that's what you did.

'Better that way,' he murmured. 'Better in the long term that you didn't put him down yourself; believe me.'