Revenge (David Shelley #1) - James Patterson Page 0,78
applied packing tape. The two men brought it close to where Dmitry, Karen, and Sergei stood and then dropped it with a thump to the ground.
Karen looked sharply at one of them. “I said nothing about bringing the body here.”
“Again, no, Karen,” said Dmitry with a kind of patient sympathy you reserve for a child who can’t grasp a simple math problem. “It is not what you think it is. This, my dear, is my present to you. The order to kill Dedushka—you may think you gave it, Karen. But I did. I hated my grandfather.”
Karen had been looking at the man she considered one of her own, her assassin, with wide disbelieving eyes, the eyes of somebody watching their plan unravel. The man returned her gaze impassively. His expression remained unchanged even when Dmitry strolled over and threw an arm around his shoulders, beaming with pride.
At that, Karen looked as though she wanted to be sick. Her gun hand began to shake, and her gaze flicked to Sergei, who until mere moments ago she’d considered her ally, her co-conspirator.
All Sergei said to her was “And I hated my brother.”
One of Dmitry’s men—because of course they were all Dmitry’s men—stepped forward. A Stanley knife clicked. He slashed open the plastic, slicing too hard, so that as the black fell away, they saw that he had slashed the face of the fresh corpse beneath.
Even so, judging by Karen’s reaction, there was no doubt who it was.
Malcolm Regan.
CHAPTER 62
IN THE DISTANCE a DLR train trundled past on its elevated rail. Canary Wharf’s aircraft warning light blinked implacably. And Karen Regan looked down at the body of her late father, at the line of freshly parted skin on his face. No blood, almost as though his flesh had been unzipped.
“Sergei told me everything, Karen,” said Dmitry. “How you tried to enlist him in a plot against me, thinking he might want to avenge his brother. But of course you hadn’t told him the whole truth, had you? And so for that I needed to listen in on your conversation with Mrs. Drake. Very interesting. What planning. What cunning.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, raising his voice, “when we look back and wonder how all this began, we need only look at my wife, Karen, for it is she who killed Emma Drake and brought the wrath of her father upon us. Should I be thanking her or should I be cursing her? Do you know, I really cannot decide.”
But if Karen was even listening to her husband she made no sign. Instead she stared in horror and disbelief at the corpse on the tarmac. “Daddy,” she said, and the harsh headlights seemed to accentuate her pallor as the blood drained from her face.
A ripple ran through those present. Shelley could have sworn he heard one of the men giggle. Even Susie Drake seemed to be watching with an ugly fascination.
And for perhaps ten seconds that was how Karen stood. Statue-like. Absolutely stock-still. Almost as though she was gathering the strength for a primal howl of grief.
Maybe Dmitry and the Chechens thought so, too, and had been hoping to savor this moment. Perhaps they’d expected a more visceral and therefore less decisive reaction from Karen.
But, if so, they’d underestimated her. Because Karen was a killer, a survivor—she was her father’s daughter—and in the instant that she had seen his body on the ground she’d realized she only had one option.
To switch sides.
Shelley was her ally now.
She caught his eye, and he was the only one not taken by surprise by what she did next.
“Run!” she called, and then she jinked to the side and twisted, her coat billowing and her bad right arm raised for balance as she put two well-grouped shots into a man who stood behind her, who jerked as though punched, spitting blood as he fell.
Men bellowed in Russian. Guns were raised. And it should have been a shooting gallery but for the fact that the Chechens flanked their enemy on both sides and risked hitting each other. For a precious second confusion and hesitancy reigned, enough time for Shelley to pull Susie out of the line of fire an eyeblink before the shooting began.
And then it did begin.
Rounds whistled past. There was the familiar thump of bullet hitting body. Karen screamed, and in the half-light Shelley saw that half her face was torn away as she dropped to her knees, Beretta held two-handed, still firing off shots.