Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

The gun fell from his hand and clattered to the ground, but still I couldn’t stop myself, enjoying the hot pain in my knuckles as I kept up my assault.

‘Stop it, Sean. You’ll kill him!’

It was Tina. On her feet now, her nose bleeding, her words slightly slurred, her hands grabbing at my arm.

‘We need him alive. He’s our only link to Wise.’

And in that moment, the anger seemed to flood out of me, and I let go of Captain Bob and stumbled backwards, before falling to the floor under the dead weight of my bad leg.

The last thing I saw before I shut my eyes and lost consciousness was Tina ripping the balaclava off the man who’d been my boss for ten years, revealing a face that was a bloody, defeated mess.

It was over. All of it.

Tina settled into her seat on the plane as it waited for take-off, and relaxed with an orange juice. She’d been off the booze for close to a month now, and wasn’t even missing it any more, although she knew it was far too early to claim success. Alcohol has a way of sneaking back, unnoticed, into a person’s life, but for the moment she was doing a good job of forgetting about it. The cigarettes were a different story. She’d managed to cut down from twenty a day to ten, but that was the extent of it. Still, she figured any normal person had to have some vices.

It was six weeks now since Robin Samuel-Smith’s arrest for attempted murder, and he was currently awaiting trial in the top-security wing of Belmarsh Prison. Tina’s own suspension had been lifted at the same time, it having been decided by the powers-that-be that punishing the police officer who’d done so much to break the whole case wouldn’t sit too well in the court of public opinion.

However, Sean Egan, the man who’d possibly saved her life twice, and who’d also done so much to bring justice to those involved, had resigned his position. She’d only seen him once since that night in her apartment, when they’d met for coffee in a local Starbucks, and he’d told her he was planning on leaving the country for a while and going out to spend some time with cousins of his in New Zealand. He’d tried to get her out for a drink before he left, but somehow she didn’t think it would work. When it came down to it, they were too similar. Both opinionated and impulsive, they’d probably end up killing each other if they ever got together. She’d told him that and he’d laughed and replied that she was probably right.

In the end, Tina had taken a leaf out of Egan’s book and applied for a leave of unpaid absence to recuperate — something which had been agreed to immediately. She imagined that her bosses were secretly pleased at the fact that she was out of their hair for a while.

So here she was, on the way to Central America for a month-long backpacking trip in Costa Rica and Panama. She’d even treated herself to a business-class ticket, and though the cost had been frankly enormous and taken a great chunk out of her savings, she felt that she deserved it.

The stewardess came by with newspapers and she picked a copy of The Times , allowing herself a small smile as she saw the photograph on the front cover. It showed a short, balding man in an unfashionable cream-coloured suit, with flabby cheeks and a pinched, shrew-like face, holding a hand up to shield himself from the flash of a camera. Paul Wise looked like a man under a lot of pressure, but then that was because he was. The government might have survived the scandal that had hit them in the shape of Anthony Gore, taking turns to get on camera and vilify every aspect of his life and career, knowing that he couldn’t fight back, but for Paul Wise, it was a different story. The crimes he’d committed over so many years were finally coming back to haunt him, now that he seemed to have lost all his backers within the establishment. He’d been named as the man behind the Kent conspiracy, and had been named too as the Mr Big behind a number of other serious crimes. Although he’d so far escaped extradition, and was fervently denying everything through his lawyers, as well as threatening legal action against those who’d named him, these threats and denials were being drowned out by the huge tsunami of pressure being aimed at the Northern Cyprus government, and at Turkey, which effectively controlled much of Northern Cyprus’s foreign policy, to deport him back to the UK to face trial.

Wise had become a hunted man, hounded by a press that wasn’t going to let him go, and Tina was confident that the hunt would soon be over and justice would prevail.

She put the paper down, no longer feeling the need to read the article, and stretched in the seat, experiencing a sense of real peace as she looked forward to the opportunity to take a break from the stale, painful life she’d been leading, and reinvigorate herself.

Before she left, Mike Bolt had called and asked if she was planning on coming back, or whether this was it, the beginning of a new life. It was a good question, and one she’d been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks. But the answer was always the same, and always would be, because in the end, there could be no other way.

‘Of course I bloody am.’