Ultimatum

Seventy-nine

21.39

For a few seconds, Tina didn’t even breathe. Then, slowly, she exhaled and lowered the gun as the armed officers raced over to her. She made no move to resist as the Glock was carefully removed from her fingers. Instead she stared down at the man she’d just shot.

Fox lay on his back, convulsing and gasping for air, his hands down by his side, his eyes wide with shock. His gun had dropped from his hand and was now out of reach — not that he was in any position to use it. She’d shot him once, in the chest, and already his movements were beginning to slow as his heart stopped working.

A group of officers approached him carefully, pointing their MP5s down at his torso, but none made any move to help him. Only when his eyes closed and he stopped moving altogether did someone shout for medical help, but by that point Tina was already walking away from the scene, almost in a daze, her heart hammering in her chest, as she tried to come to terms with what had happened.

One of the officers walked with her. Putting an arm round her shoulders, he asked if she was OK. She wasn’t. She was shell-shocked. She’d seen too much in one day — more than her mind could quite take in. But she shrugged off his arm and told him she was OK, and he didn’t try to stop her, even though she was going to have to make a statement.

More people were coming up the incline now, a long, straggling line of police officers, the majority of them armed, and ambulance crew. They were hurrying, some glancing across as they passed, but no one saying anything. Whether they knew who she was or not, it seemed as though they all wanted to give her a wide berth. Blue lights flashed through the trees in a wide and ever-growing arc as the emergency services continued to arrive in large numbers — but too late, as so often, to prevent the bloodbath.

Tina sighed. She’d been played. They all had. She’d fallen for Fox’s lies. She’d believed that he was genuinely going to cooperate. So, it seemed, had a lot of other people, including members of the government, who’d authorized his move to a safehouse. No one had believed that the individuals they were dealing with would have dared launch such an audacious rescue attempt. But perhaps they should have done. Audacious attacks seemed to be these people’s forte. Jesus, they’d even attacked the Shard.

But ultimately they’d failed. London had been shaken, but it was still there, just as it had been when the attacks had started this morning; and the perpetrators hadn’t been able to achieve their goal of making it look like the work of homegrown Islamic extremists, further diminishing the effect of their bombs.

Fox, too, had got the fate he deserved. Tina found it hard to believe that she’d been the one who’d killed him. She’d killed before, more than once. Two of those killings had been legal and were out in the public domain. One wasn’t, and never would be. But the shock of ending a life always hit her like a hard, physical blow, especially when it was done at close quarters. She wasn’t a soldier. She hadn’t been trained to kill. She was just a copper, for Christ’s sake, although after tonight, she wasn’t sure for how much longer.

Still, she was too tired to worry about that now. Reaching into her jacket with shaking hands, she pulled out a cigarette and lit it, savouring the hit as the smoke flew down her throat and into her lungs.

Before she called it a day, though, she needed to do one more thing.