guns. Nothing currently in existence would produce the tidy quip sound heard in the movies. Suppressor was more accurate: at best, the shot would be muffled so that the sound resembled a heavy book being slammed down on to a table.
The basement was almost empty and echoes were likely to carry, but with the car doors closed Purkiss didn’t think a suppressed shot would be noticeable by Rossiter and Teague, two floors above. Which meant that she might risk one.
He stared past the muzzle at her eyes. They were steady, unreadable. Hazel, he decided, though he was generally hopeless at distinguishing shades of colour.
She was a trained agent and no doubt a fighter but the right side of her throat was exposed, the pulse beating steadily beneath the skin. He could immobilise her in less than a second, except that her index finger was tight across the trigger and he didn’t think he’d have long enough.
A second passed. Two. She said nothing, made no gesture for him to get out. It was to be an execution, which meant there was nothing to lose by making a move.
Purkiss’s instincts took over. He turned his head a fraction to the right because a shot to the face was likely to take out his frontal lobes. A shot to the head from the side would almost certainly kill him, too, but there was the minutest chance that the bullet would pass through another part of the brain, the occipital lobe perhaps, and blind him but allow him to continue functioning for long enough to take her down. The long muscles of his limbs tensed in readiness for action and to reduce the amount of his body available as a target. The trick was to act before the breathing rate increased, as it inevitably would, because that was a giveaway to one’s opponent.
He brought the side of his left fist across in a hammer blow at Klavan’s face while his right arm reached across to grip the wrist of her gun arm. It was a two-pronged attack intended both to incapacitate and to get the gun pointing elsewhere, because even in death the trigger finger was liable to twitch, and it would be embarrassing to go down in the annals as having been shot by a dead person. The gun arm was already gone and her right arm was up and his fist caught the side of her wrist. She gave a cry but managed to gasp, ‘Wait,’ and pointed the gun at the roof of the car . She jacked the magazine out into the footwell and ratcheted the remaining bullet out of the chamber so that it bounced off the dashboard.
He waited, tense, a moment longer. She was rubbing her wrist where his fist had connected. He sagged back into his seat, staring at her.
‘I had to know,’ she said.
‘Know what?’
‘That you didn’t suspect me.’
He let the silence play out, his breathing slowing.
She raised her eyes. ‘Of course I know what’s going on. The woman, Ilkun, didn’t get rid of her SIM card because of some vague suspicions about the delicacy of our interrogation. She did it because somebody tipped her off about it, alerted her beforehand about the interrogation and everything else. I knew you’d worked that out after you called me in the car. And assuming you yourself aren’t the one who tipped off Ilkun –’
‘Because that would make no sense at all –’
‘It must be one of us. Richard, Chris or me. I assumed I was under suspicion just as much as the other two. But when you saw the gun just now you were genuinely surprised.’
He had been, she was right. The realisation unsettled him. Ruling her out entirely was dangerous, especially if he’d done it unconsciously.
‘That wasn’t very clever. I could have killed you.’
‘No, you couldn’t. You wouldn’t have seen the shot coming.’
He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Too many shocks, too many adrenaline spikes. He’d read that repeated surges of stress hormones might contribute to the development of dementia in the long run. Perhaps it would come as a relief, no more memories.
‘Your arm okay?’
‘I’ll live.’ But she gripped the wheel more gingerly with the hand on the affected side. She hadn’t started the engine yet.
‘So if it’s not you, which one is it?’
She shut her eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking about that ever since I made the connection.’
‘Naturally. And?’
She sighed. ‘It must be Rossiter.’
‘Why?’
‘Mostly by elimination. Because it can’t be Chris