sit up all night in the fireside chair with his hammer on his lap, waiting for someone to storm in here. Aware that what disturbed him just might have been the old lady from downstairs looking for her cat, he held the hammer behind him and opened the door with his left hand.
A weak yellow light burned on the landing all night. There was no furniture to cast shadows or conceal an intruder, just the stairs that went up and the stairs that went down. No one was there. A couple of swift steps took him to the stairwell and he looked up and down, and still he saw no one.
He emptied his lungs in a soft, ragged sigh and drew a proper breath for the first time in five minutes. A false alarm. Another one.
He didn’t have a clock. He put the hammer down on the bed, parted the curtains and angled his watch to the streetlamp outside. A little before three o’clock. The sandwich bar had closed and no one was on the street. Finally he turned off the TV.
But he’d forgotten something. Something so basic it took him a moment to remember what it was. He’d listened at the door, he’d checked the landing, up the stairs and down, come back inside, checked the time …
He hadn’t locked the door behind him.
Even as he reached for it, it opened and there was a man in the room with him. As quickly as that. He must have taken at least a couple of steps but Horn didn’t see them. Lacking only the puff of smoke, he arrived like the evil magician on a pantomime stage—not there one second, there the next. The room was still dark—darker, now, without the television—so Horn couldn’t see the face, only the silhouette against the weak light from the landing. Even so, he knew two things about him. This wasn’t one of Hanratty’s in-house heavies, he was too good. And although Horn couldn’t see it, he had a gun in his hand. Not in a pocket, not under his arm—in his hand, ready for immediate use. Eighteen months ago the old thug had grown tired of failure, put the contract out to tender and started employing professionals.
Horn had run out of luck at last. Being strong, fit and fast isn’t enough against a professional killer. A bullet traveling at twice the speed of sound is always going to be faster.
“Nicholas Horn?” The voice told him nothing. No regional accent, no indication of age, no patois of class—all the tags that might help identify him had been rigorously schooled out of it. Early in his career this man had spent hours talking to a tape recorder and playing it back, listening acutely and analyzing what he heard; and he hadn’t felt even slightly foolish doing it. A pro. A genuine, twenty-four-karat, blink-and-you’ll-miss-him hit man.
Horn had got a bit of a shock the first time he realized the all-purpose muscle Hanratty used to police his narcotics empire and operate his protection rackets had been superseded by someone with real skill and finesse. Someone expert, and expensive. Hanratty had decided that nothing mattered to him—not the Bentley, not the yacht, not the family acres in Ireland or the house in Bloomsbury or the contents of all those numbered bank accounts, nothing—so much as repaying the man who killed his son. Though a combination of good luck and good reactions allowed him to escape even as the net closed, Horn knew he’d never be as lucky again. That now he had a pro on his case, he was as good as dead. That this moment would come, when he was face-to-face with the man who’d taken Hanratty’s contract, and this time running would not be an option.
Only basic survival instinct, the absolute determination of living things to keep living as long as possible, kept him from making a bad mistake. He was not entirely unarmed. His penknife was where it always was, in the back pocket of the jeans he hadn’t got round to climbing out of. It wasn’t designed as a weapon, mostly he used it for marking cuts in timber, but it was strong and it was sharp, and producing it would have made a casual mugger pause for thought. This man was not a casual mugger. If Horn dived for his back pocket, he’d kill him. Even if he managed to get it out, he’d have to open it before it would be any