Mrs. John Doe

Chapter 46

She was onstage. This muddy road in the forest was her platform, and these three men were her costars. One was down, shot and presumed dead, and one was beside her, injured and ill and barely able to stand. The third, the villain of the piece, was walking toward her, smiling, closing the gap between them. Ten feet. Eight feet. Seven. Nora stood very still, clutching her husband’s arm and her most important prop-the loaded revolver that looked so much like her own empty one-waiting for her cue.

Craig Elder came to a stop five feet in front of them, the weapon still aimed at Jeff’s chest. That maddening little smile was still there, on his lips. In his eyes.

And in his voice. “Did you really think you could outwit me, Nora? After all we’ve been through? You insult me. I knew where you’d go from the moment we found that you weren’t in your room anymore. I knew you’d bring your husband here, and thanks to you, I was even expecting him.” He jerked his left thumb over his shoulder, indicating Josef, who lay sprawled in the mud behind him, pelted by the steady rain.

Nora kept her gaze locked with Craig’s, but she used her peripheral vision. She strained to be aware of any movement in the space just beside Craig’s left arm, the blurry form of the man lying in the road. He was an actor, Jeff had said, and she assumed he’d meant it literally. Now he was pretending to be dead, and she knew that her cue, when it came, would be from him. Until then, she had one motivation in this scene: to keep Craig’s attention, to prevent him from turning around.

“You’re out of time,” Craig said, “and I’m out of patience. Whatever he gave you isn’t in the envelope. Tell me what you did with it.”

Nora contemplated spitting in his face, then thought better of it; that only worked in Victorian melodramas or Joan Crawford movies. She drew in a breath and said, “Or what? You’ll shoot us? You’re going to do that anyway, so why should I tell you where it is?”

The little smile on his handsome face vanished. He lowered the SIG Sauer until it was aimed directly at Jeff’s uninjured left knee. “Because I’m the one with the gun. I can do this quickly, or I can do it very, very slowly. And please don’t bother attempting to scare me with that useless revolver you’re trying to conceal. Remember, I’m the one who emptied the chamber.”

Nora pulled the gun out from between her body and Jeff’s, and turned around to face Craig. She dropped her right hand carelessly to her side, her finger never leaving the trigger.

“Oh well, it was worth a try,” she said with a shrug.

Behind Craig, the figure in the road stirred. Josef slowly sat up and rose to his knees. It was obvious, even from this distance, that he was in great pain, but it didn’t deter him. He reached down with his right hand and pulled something from the pocket of his jeans. As if sensing the movement behind him, Craig started to turn his head.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Nora said quickly, regaining his attention. He looked at her expectantly.

“No, Nora!” Jeff said. “Don’t tell him where it is!” He too had seen the activity behind Craig, and he was playing along. Good.

She shrugged again. “Darling, he already has it-he just doesn’t know it.”

“Hush!” her husband cried. “If you tell him, he’ll succeed, and we can’t let him do that!” He was overdoing his part, but then again, he wasn’t a professional actor.

Now Craig was watching them, fascinated. “I already have it? What the hell does that mean?” Behind him, Josef raised his right arm. Through the rain, Nora saw the glint from the object in his hand, and she remembered the moment in Russell Square Gardens when she had first seen it.

Nora smiled at Craig, timing her next line perfectly to synchronize with the action behind him. “It means, Craig Elder the younger”-Josef’s arm snapped down-“you can go to hell!”

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.