Tom Cain - Assassin

And now she started to talk. ‘My name is Lara Dashian…’

‘Well, that does it,’ murmured Tyzack, his finger hovering over a digital ‘Fire’ button displayed at the screen’s bottom right.

The drone had settled on a course that aimed it directly at the stage. It was moving in.

Just a few seconds to go now.

Carver had been reduced to screaming down the microphone, ‘Get him off the stage! Get the President off the fucking stage!’ But the people at whom he was shouting either could not or would not hear him.

Lara Dashian had begun to speak. This, Carver realized, was the perfect moment for Tyzack to strike. He must think Christmas had come early, being able to get rid of his prime target, the President, and an inconvenient witness to a past crime.

There was only one way to stop this.

Carver stepped right up close to Grantham and yelled in his ear, ‘Give me your gun!’

Grantham shook his head.

‘Give me the bloody gun!’

Grantham turned and pushed Carver away.

Carver stepped back, away from Grantham’s hand, fractionally adjusted his balance and then sprang forwards. As he moved he swung the heel of his right hand, slamming it into Grantham’s face, just to one side of his chin. The blow caused Grantham’s head to jerk round, wrenching the tendons of his neck and sending his brain bouncing off the inner walls of his skull like a pea in a whistle. Grantham was lifted off his feet and flung back across the roof until his body slammed to a halt against a raised air-conditioning vent.

Carver walked across and removed Grantham’s gun from its shoulder holster. SIS must have taken advice from the Special Forces because the gun was a SIG-Sauer P226, precisely the same model that Carver himself always used. That would make life easier.

Something had to, because what he was about to do was verging on the impossible.

He stepped to the edge of the roof and looked over the parapet to the stage, at least one hundred yards away. The distance was at the very furthest limit of the gun’s effective range. He was shooting downwards, into and across a stiff breeze coming in off the river behind the stage.

But he had no alternative.

Carver raised his gun, aimed it at Lincoln Roberts, President of the United States, and fired.

‘No!’ shouted Damon Tyzack as four gunshots rang out and one of the clear perspex screens that acted both as the President’s autocue and his shield shook with the impact of the bullets.

On the display in front of him the drone was still five seconds away from the point at which the two anti-personnel grenades mounted in place of the conventional surveillance equipment could be released.

Before the sound of the shots had died away, the first Secret Service man had hurtled across the stage, grabbed the President and was manhandling him away. Roberts appeared to be trying to stop him. He was reaching out towards the girl, but the agent, now joined by two of his colleagues, had virtually lifted their charge off his feet and was carrying him to safety.

Two seconds left and Tyzack – his system surging with a toxic cocktail of rage, impotence and overwhelming frustration – thought about firing on the President himself. But his own gun was still holstered. It would take too long to draw, aim and fire. In any case, unless he shot the three Secret Service men up there with him before aiming at their President he would be signing his own death warrant. There was certainly not time to hit all four targets. From now on in it was strictly a damage-limitation exercise.

He could hear the Americans talking to their headquarters.

‘I saw muzzle-flash,’ one was saying.

‘I have a location,’ the other added, virtually simultaneously.

At the front of the crowd, the dignitaries nearest to the stage were desperately trying to get away and their panic had already begun to infect those around them.

Meanwhile the whore had barely moved at all, paralysed by indecision and fear. All was not yet lost. At least he could get her.

Tyzack pressed the red button on his display and the grenades were released. For a fraction of a second, as he launched the attack, his gaze had dropped to the iPhone. When he looked up there was another figure on the stage. A tall, spindly young man in glasses was racing towards the whore. He wrapped his arms around her, held her tight and then leaped off the front of the stage.

An instant later the grenades struck the stage at exactly the point where Lincoln Roberts had been standing. They detonated in a pair of orange and yellow fireballs that blasted superheated fragments of steel shrapnel through the air, shredding the screen that had withstood the gunshots, destroying the backdrop, ripping into the lighting rigs above and to the sides of the speaking area and killing several members of the stage crew, as well as a Secret Service agent who had not yet got offstage.

The main force of the blast, having exploded some ten feet above the ground, went over the heads of the crowd in the immediate vicinity, though several people further back were killed and many more wounded by shrapnel particles that travelled up to two hundred yards from the impact point. Tyzack’s attention, however, was concentrated on the foot of the stage where the whore’s body lay motionless on the ground, next to that of the young man who had tried to rescue her.

For a moment Tyzack felt a brief flutter of hope, a tiny scintilla of optimism amidst the bleak disappointment of the failed mission. But even that shred of good news was taken from him as the whore slowly pulled herself out from under the man’s body, staggered to her feet and then, when she saw that the figure was utterly inert, started screaming with a desperate despair that seemed to Tyzack to echo his own feelings.

Perhaps he should put the silly bitch out of her misery.

There was nothing to stop him shooting her. It was a fiendishly tricky shot but there was no risk from the Secret Service. They knew that their President was safe. Tyzack could always claim to have aimed at a fleeing suspect.

He unholstered his weapon and then stopped as he heard one of the Americans say, ‘I have a visual on the roof from which the shots were fired. There is a man down, repeat a man down. Another man appears to be vacating the area. He is approximately six feet tall, slim to medium build, dark brown hair, wearing civilian clothes: black pants, possibly jeans, and some kind of grey top.’

Carver, thought Tyzack with rancid bitterness.

Forget the whore. It was time to go. Tyzack wasn’t afraid of being caught by any British or American security forces and he certainly wasn’t scared of Carver. But the absolute certainty of Arjan Visar’s displeasure, and its potentially fatal consequences, meant that he needed to disappear. Starting right now.

He walked towards the door that led to the stairway down to the top floor of the building. When he got there he turned and said, ‘Bye, chaps.’

The two Secret Service men turned towards him, an automatic reflex, acknowledging his farewell. Tyzack killed them both with two single headshots. It was time, he decided, that he made sure witnesses were definitely, undeniably dead. Furthermore, it was always a delight, the sort of thing that only a true connoisseur could appreciate, to see the fractional look of surprise on the face of the second of two victims as they realized what had just happened to their companion an instant before it happened to them, too. And finally, he was seriously pissed off, and the sheer pleasure of inflicting death took the edge, at least, off his anger.

Just as he was about to get off the roof, Carver heard two shots from high up the tower closest to the stage. He looked up and saw a male figure on the roof; only the top half of him visible above the parapet. From that distance Carver was unable to make out his face. Nor could he see the distinctive flash of red hair. And yet he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was Tyzack. His outline, his movements, everything about him had become so familiar and their relationship had, in its own warped way, become as intertwined as a pair of lovers, so that awareness of his presence was automatic, instinctive. The location made sense, too. It was the highest, closest point to the stage, the perfect vantage point from which to direct a low-level aerial attack.