Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

Lana wrapped her arms around her body and shook violently with emotion.

Will shouted, “Lana, are they disarmed?”

Lana inhaled slowly, and her body steadied. “They are. They’re safe.”

Will checked his watch. It was 9:00 P.M. He looked around, waited, counted seconds, could barely hear the concert, but life was clearly continuing in the building. He sighed and looked at Lana.

Her gun was pointing at him. She rubbed tears away from her face and breathed loudly. She shrugged. “So it’s over now.”

“Put the gun down, Lana.”

She shook her head.

“Put the gun down, Lana.”

Lana huffed. “You’ll put me in a prison cell for the rest of my life.”

“Lana, put the gun down! You’ve disarmed the bombs. That will go in your favor.”

Lana shook her head again.

“Put the gun down.” The voice was not Will’s.

He spun around and faced a man who was pointing his gun at Lana and Will. One of the men whom Will had seen on the floor above. A Secret Service agent. He was alone.

The man looked at Will. “We’ve been looking for you.”

Will nodded. Now that the bombs were disarmed, he decided that his work was done. He decided that he had to tell the Secret Service what was happening here.

The man looked at Lana and fixed his gun on her.

Will said, “I am a British intelligence officer.”

The Secret Service man glanced at Will.

A shot rang out, and a bullet struck the Secret Service man in the center of his head. Will closed his eyes. He turned slowly to look at Lana. Her gun was pointing at the now prone and dead agent. She moved the gun so that it was pointing at Will’s head.

Lana smiled. “My next bullet’s for you.”

Will shook his head. “Why did you kill him? Why are you still holding a gun?”

“Because I have fucking nothing now. Because it seems I’ve always had nothing.”

Will sighed and briefly felt pity for her. “You could have had so much more. I hoped that you and I could have been together.”

“I know you did.” She laughed humorlessly. “I might have been a pawn in Megiddo’s game, but you were certainly a pawn in mine. I wanted you to love me. I needed your emotions for me to cloud any possibility that you might suspect my true role in Megiddo’s plan. I had to try to get you to expose your soul to me so that I could watch you suffer when you realized that your emotions had been totally duped.”

Will shook his head. He felt a coldness descend over his mind. He felt momentarily numb. “I see.”

Lana watched him without emotion. “We often see the truth only at the very end of things. We both now know our truths, but only one of us is going to walk out of this place.”

“I know.” In a movement that was too quick to be seen and stopped, Will stepped forward, grabbed the barrel of Lana’s gun, used his other hand to twist her hand, and took possession of the gun, now pointing it at her head.

Will held the gun close to her. He no longer felt numb, and instead his heart filled with anger, regret, and sorrow. “I lied to you. Megiddo never described you as a pawn in his game. I think he really did love you.”

Lana’s mouth dropped open in a look of total surprise. Which swiftly turned to anger. “You tricked me!”

“I stopped you from making a dreadful mistake.”

Lana’s eyes darted left and right, and she seemed to be making some kind of calculation. She looked at Will. “I have to be with Megiddo again.”

“No, Lana.”

She raised her hand and brought her cell phone close to her chest.

“Lana, do not do that.”

She smiled and moved her other hand toward the phone’s number pad.

“Lana, stop now.”

She moved a single finger close to the cell phone. Her smile faded. “In a different life, it would have been wonderful to get to know you.”

Will’s heart pumped fast. “Don’t touch that phone! Don’t trigger the bombs!”

Her finger moved until it was an inch from the phone. She smiled again. “Good-bye, Will Cochrane.”

Her finger descended to the number pad.

In that tiniest moment, Will knew that it was too late to say anything else, that action was all that mattered now, but as he watched her finger move and squeezed his own finger back rapidly on the handgun’s trigger, he felt nothing but overwhelming sorrow. He heard the sound of his gun, felt the weapon recoil, saw his bullet strike Lana in the side of the head and rip open her beautiful face. He watched her move away from him, her knees buckle, her body start to fall, and her hand release the cell phone. He saw the death of Lana Beseisu.

He dashed forward and caught the phone before it fell to the floor alongside her. He looked at the display screen and sighed with relief as he saw that his trigger finger had been quicker than hers. No number had been depressed.

He looked at Lana’s dead body and felt giddy and sick. He had thought this woman would change everything for him. But now he stared at her, knowing that she’d been prepared to help Megiddo slaughter millions of people for no other reason than her love for the monster.

He looked around and imagined the floors above him in the opera house, the boxes where the premiers’ wives were sitting during the performance, the other boxes and the ground-level seats containing the audience of children and the orchestra area holding excited child performers. He pictured bombs and fire raining down from the ceiling and tearing through all of that, causing the total war that would have resulted from the abhorrent act were he not standing over the dead body of Lana Beseisu. He shook his head in disbelief.

He looked at Lana one last time. There was so much he wanted to know about her, so much that did not make sense. But he knew that things could have been different. He knelt beside her and smoothed a hand against her bloody face. He ran his fingers through her hair and whispered, “If I’d been there at the beginning, you would not be here now.”

He closed his eyes and saw the young Lana walking desperately through frozen Bosnian woods, her clothes torn and offering no protection against the bitter winter, her legs staggering, her eyes wide with fear, her body weak and in shock after being raped, her mind focused only on reaching the besieged city of Sarajevo and being with the man called Megiddo. He imagined her falling to the ground, crawling through thick snow, pulling herself to her feet again, staggering forward, falling again, crawling again, but continuing to use all her remaining strength to find the man she believed was her savior. He watched every movement she made and every exertion take her inch by inch closer to a man who would corrupt her life so that it would end with a bullet in her brain.

He wished he’d been there as she dragged her mind and her desecrated body through the terrible war-torn forests. He would have gone to her, taken her hand, and walked her away from Sarajevo and the deadly man it contained. He would have spoken soft but commanding words to her. Come with me. I am taking you to a better life.`

Will looked at the clear blue sky above him, at the snow-covered Swiss Alps around him, at the empty mountain valley far below his feet. His cell phone rang, and he saw that the caller was Alistair. He answered, listened to what the Controller had to say, shut his phone, and turned to look at the ski chalet beside him. He pulled out his handgun, strode quickly through the snow, opened the door to the building, and walked through one room before entering another.

Harry was there, seated behind a desk, smoking a cigarette. Two British Special Forces men flanked him. They had brought Harry to this place after tracking him to the city of Lausanne.