Tom Savage - Mrs. John Doe

With her left hand, she shoved her husband as hard as she could, sending him sprawling to the side, and she brought up her right hand with the gun. Startled, Craig raised the SIG Sauer, now aimed directly at her. Josef’s switchblade entered his back at that precise moment, and his arm jerked upward as he fired. Pfft . The silenced shot flew off into the trees. At the same moment, Nora fired. The report from the dead guard’s revolver was deafening. The round slammed into the center of Craig’s chest, and the gun fell from his hand. He stood there, staring at her, his mouth falling open in surprise. He sank to his knees, reaching down to pick up the fallen weapon, but Nora fired again. And again. And once more, the final bullet aimed directly between his eyes. His head erupted, and he toppled over backward. He crashed down into the mud, driving the knife more firmly into his back, and lay still.

Silence. The downpour continued, pelting the leaves above and the road below, pounding down on the car, a continuous wall of noise, but she barely heard it. She was only vaguely aware of Jeff’s groans as he struggled to his feet and the softer moans of Josef Abrams as he sank back down onto the road. The explosions of the revolver in her hand had taken all other sound away, leaving a void in her ears. She thought, I just killed a man. I took a human life, but I’m not horrified. I saved my husband, and Josef, and myself. So, why don’t I feel triumphant? Why do I feel only this emptiness, this lack of any feeling at all? She shut her eyes and listened to the quiet.

When Jeff reached over and removed the gun from her hand, the world came back to her. The icy rain soaked her, dripping from her hair, running down her face in rivulets. She was wet and freezing and alive. Alive.

She looked down at the dead man lying at her feet. She knelt beside him and fished the car keys from his jacket pocket, where she also found his cellphone. She strained to roll him over onto his stomach, his face buried in the mud. She pulled Josef’s knife from his back, carefully wiped it clean on his jacket, picked up the SIG Sauer, and stood up. She didn’t look at Craig Elder again. She left him lying there and turned to her husband.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “I had to push you out of the line of fire-”

“I know,” he said. “I’m okay. My leg hurts like hell-but when I consider the alternative, I can’t complain. We’d better see how Joe is.”

She shouldered her bag and took his right arm. They made their crablike, hopping way over to the car. She noticed that Jeff hadn’t mentioned what she’d just done. In his line of work, he must know there wasn’t much that could be said about it after the fact. As they said in the Scottish play, What’s done cannot be undone . Jeff had presumably killed people, perhaps many people, but they’d never talked about it. Now she knew they never would. She’d been initiated; she’d killed a man, and that was that.

Josef Abrams was not her husband. The first thing he said when they reached him was “That was excellent, Mrs. Baron! Thank you.”

“Nora,” she said, handing him his switchblade. “How are you doing?”

“I’ve been better,” he muttered, wincing, “but I’ll live.”

Nora helped him to his feet, and she unlocked the car doors while he retrieved his pistol. She helped Jeff get into the back, where he could sit sideways with his injured leg stretched out across the seat; he wasn’t able to bend his knee. Josef got into the front passenger seat, and she helped him remove his jacket and T-shirt.

The bullet had passed through him, back to front, on his extreme right side just below his lowest rib-too low for the lung and too high for the kidney, or so she fervently hoped. Too far right for his stomach, but she wasn’t sure about the large intestine. She wished she could recall more of her high school biology. The two tiny holes were about four inches apart, and they were bleeding.

Nora used the scarf and shawl from her bag, covering the holes with the silk before wrapping the shawl around his middle as tightly as she could. She found safety pins to secure the temporary dressing, helped him get back into the shirt and jacket, and rummaged for her bottle of Advil. She poured several gelcaps into his hand and caught rain in the cap of the bottle for him to wash them down. She also took a couple for good measure before getting into the driver’s seat.

Craig Elder’s prepaid phone was dead, as dead as Josef’s phone. As dead as Craig, Nora thought. So much for calling the police-they wouldn’t be able to arrive in time anyway. She remembered what Craig had said about his burner phones being untraceable, and about never storing information in them. She dropped the useless object and started the engine, bracing herself. She wanted to drive to the nearest hospital, but there was work to do first.

No police, no British agents, no French agents, no CIA-only the three of them. They had to get to Cowper Field before that plane took off.

“I’m the one who started all this,” Josef Abrams said.

Nora looked over at him for a moment, then back at the road. She was still getting used to driving on the wrong side of the street with a steering wheel that was on the wrong side of the car, and the torrential rain and windshield wipers didn’t help matters. A larger, northbound road was coming up on the left, the one where Josef had seen the Aston Martin turn. She swung the steering wheel, then glanced at her watch: 2:36. They might already be too late.

Josef turned to Jeff in the backseat and said, “They killed Maurice Dolin. He’s in the hayloft. He came out here yesterday, and they must have done it as soon as he arrived. I’m sorry-I know he was a friend of yours.”

“I was afraid of that,” Jeff said, “but I’m not surprised. I heard them talking about him; they knew I’d been in touch with him. I guess they figured he knew what I knew, so he was a liability to them. It would have been easy for them to get him here, to Laurels. Bill probably had Craig Elder call Maurice, posing as one of my people, and tell him that I was about to nab Bill and his gang. Poor Maurice didn’t even know about Bill, but he would have jumped at the chance to join me for the bust. He probably ran all the way here.”

“That sounds about right,” Nora said. “They said on the news last night that he dropped everything and came rushing to England. He was also at the cemetery in Pinède right after I was there the other night. You don’t know about that, darling, but I’ll tell you later.”

“Actually, I heard most of it from them,” Jeff said. “Bill came out here the morning you went to France, and he enjoyed giving me blow-by-blow descriptions of your journey. I guess he thought it would make me talk. I would have, too, if I’d thought it would keep you safe. I’d already told Maurice that you’d be coming over to claim my remains, so he knew what you were doing. He must have gone to Pinède when he heard about the shootout, hoping to protect you, and he figured the best way he could do that was to take you into custody.”

Nora nodded, watching the road, remembering. Armed and dangerous, approach with caution . No wonder Bill and Craig had told her Maurice Dolin was the bad guy. If she’d known his true motives, their cover would have been blown.

Now she asked Josef, “What do you mean, you started all this?”

The young man beside her shrugged. “I’m the one who found out about the arms deal in the first place. I’m with, shall we say, a certain agency in Israel; I guess you figured that out. I’m an actor, and I can pass for several nationalities. Last year I went undercover in Tripoli, and I joined Nassim Gamal’s group. When I learned of the upcoming deal, I got out of Libya and came to London. My employers don’t know I’m here; they think I’m still in Tripoli. My father-my late father worked with Mr. Baron a few times, so I knew his name. Papa once said Jeffrey Baron was the only man in the community he completely trusted. I decided to find him.”