loud that it seemed to clang off the walls like the boom of artillery. The remaining blood on his face was washed away by the tears that were coming in droves. For ten minutes he wept uncontrollably, his body thrashing from side to side.
Frank just stood there looking down, his hands clenched in fists, his own eyes moist.
And then Shaw stopped crying as abruptly as he’d started. He stood up, wiped his face dry.
“Shaw?” Frank said, eyeing him warily. “You okay?”
“I’m perfect,” he answered in a mechanical tone. Then he rushed down the steps, leaving Frank to gape after him.
When Shaw hit the street he started jogging. Jogging with a purpose. He was done with mourning. What was the point of trying to cope by letting the normal grieving process take place? He would never get over Anna’s death. So now he had to get back to something that really mattered: revenge. He would not lose sight of that again. And he would never stop until he’d gotten it.
And he knew just where to start.
Katie James.
This time he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
CHAPTER 62
“I CHECKED ON YOUR STORY about Krakow and about your father,” Katie said. She and Aron Lesnik were sitting in his tiny room at the hostel near the Thames in a far less fashionable part of London than The Phoenix Group digs. She’d brought him food and coffee, which he was devouring as she spoke.
“You check?” he said between mouthfuls of ham sandwich and crisps.
“Of course I checked. Journalists just assume everyone is lying to them.”
“I not lie to you!” Lesnik exclaimed and then took a gulp of coffee.
She looked at her notes. “Your father was Elisaz Lesnik, editor of a daily newspaper in Krakow. He was killed in 1989.”
“The Soviets murdered him. Poland was fighting for freedom then. We had Lech Walesa, the liberator, fighting for us. But my father he writes the truth and the Soviets they do not like that. They come one night when I am little boy and then he is dead.”
“That was never proven,” she pointed out.
“I do not need proof! I know!” Lesnik pounded his fist against the wall.
“So you have quite the grudge against the Russians?”
He gaped at her. “You do not believe me? You think I make this up because I hate Russians? I see people dead. I see blood everywhere. You ask me questions, I tell you truth.” He stared at her defiantly and took a vicious bite of his sandwich.
“So why are you afraid to go to the police?”
“I go to police and they think I have something to do with it. To them, Pole is like Russian. And then they tell people and killers come after me. I see what they do to my father. I no want to die like that.”
“You say you’re good with computers; mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Ask.”
She fired off some highly technical questions that she didn’t understand at all, but that a techno-friend had given her along with the answers. Lesnik responded to each of them correctly.
“Do you have computer you want me to fix, if you still not convinced?” he said crossly.
“Can’t blame a girl for checking,” she said sweetly. “Now about this Harris fellow? Tell me about him.” She’d gotten a description of Harris and wanted to see if it jibed with what Lesnik said.
“He is okay guy. Old. White hair, smells like cigar. We talk about job. He likes me, I think. He say it is good place to work, this Phoenix place. I drink some water and then I go to bathroom down the hall. Coming back is when I hear shots downstairs. I hide. Like I say already to you.”
Katie was writing all of this down. “Okay, now talk to me about-”
She didn’t finish because the door had been kicked open and he was standing there.
“Shaw! How did you know…?” She glared at him. “You followed me!”
He didn’t bother to respond. Shaw only had eyes for Lesnik, who’d shrunk back in the corner, his half-eaten ham sandwich forgotten, his coffee spilled on the floor.
He marched toward the small man, who pressed back until the wall stopped him from going anywhere else. Lesnik cried out, “Don’t let him hurt me. Don’t let him. Please!”
“Shaw, you’re scaring him.”
Shaw took a fistful of Lesnik’s shirt in his good hand. “He should be scared.”
“You say no one else know!” screamed Lesnik as he looked pitifully at Katie.
“Shaw, let him go.”
“You’re going to tell me everything you saw and heard that day. And you better not leave one damn apostrophe out! I just heard the part about you going to the john and hiding, now pick it up from there.”
Lesnik looked ready to faint, his knees buckled.
“Shaw!”
Katie grabbed at his good shoulder to try and pull him off, which was akin to a gnat harassing an elephant.
“Don’t get in the way, Katie,” Shaw said menacingly as he glanced at her.
Lesnik, however, used this moment of distraction to pluck up his courage and nail Shaw with his fist directly on the man’s bandaged arm.
“Damn it!” Shaw doubled over in pain.
The Pole leapt past him, pushed Katie down, and sprinted through the door. Shaw recovered and, holding his arm, ran after him, Katie right on his heels. They clattered down the steps, Shaw moving as fast as he could with his bad wing, but the much smaller Lesnik was seemingly jet-propelled. He hit the door to the street and was through it while Shaw and Katie were still a flight above.
Shaw smashed the door open and skidded to a stop to survey the street. Katie bumped into him. She grabbed his jacket.
“Have you lost your damn mind!” she screamed.
He suddenly saw Lesnik across the street, on the Thames side. He bolted across the road, car horns blaring, taxis swerving to avoid him as Katie followed in his wake yelling at him to stop before he killed himself.
Shaw shouted at Lesnik, who was running down the sidewalk. The Pole turned around for an instant, his face full of fear.
The shot struck him right between the eyes. He stood there for a moment, seemingly unaware his life had just ended. Then he pitched backward and over the railing. A few seconds later his body hit the flat surface of the river. A few moments after that Lesnik disappeared under the dull-colored Thames, the water briefly turning a murky crimson.
At the sound of the shot, Shaw had immediately hunched down. As Katie started to run past him yelling for Lesnik, he reached out his good arm and snagged her leg, wrenched her down, and then pulled her over behind a parked car for cover.
“Stay down!” he urged. “That was a long-range rifle round.” He edged his head above the car’s fender and took a look around, checking for an optics signature from the sniper gun but seeing none.
He looked back at Katie and his expression softened. She was shaking.
“It’s okay now.” He put an arm around her.
“No, it is not okay,” she snapped, ripping his arm off her. “You had to come here. You had to butt in. And now an innocent man is dead! Because of you!’
“Neither one of us knows how is innocent he really is,” Shaw said calmly. “But right now we need to get out of here. The police-”
“You can run. I want to talk to the police. It’ll be good background for the story.”
“You’re still going to write it?” he said incredulously.
“You bet I am. And you want to know something funny? Until you bulled your way into this whole thing I’d decided to table it, at least for a while. But now?” She looked in the direction of where Lesnik lay dead. “Now, I changed my mind.”
“Katie, listen to me-”
She cut him off again. “No, you listen to me, Shaw. I know the woman you loved got killed. I know you’re hurting. I know your life is even shittier than mine right now, but you crossed the line back there. No, you obliterated it. And I will never trust you again.”
The sound of a siren reached them. Sha
w glanced away and then looked back at her.
“You better get going. The police won’t be your best friend right now.”
“Katie, I don’t think you know what you’re getting into.”
“What I’m getting into, you sorry-ass son of a bitch, is the truth. Now get the hell out of here.”
Shaw’s eyes flashed at her for an instant, but they seemed to have lost their effect on the woman.
“Now!” she screamed at him.
As he rose to go, she said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mention you in the story. Consider it a parting gift.”
CHAPTER 63
KATIE CALLED KEVIN GALLAGHER and filled him in on what had happened. When he finally stopped hyperventilating, he only had one question: “When can you deliver the story?”
“It’s already written. I can e-mail it to you right now. You can fact-check the crap out of it and then run it.”
“Your contact is dead?”
“Yes. The police are investigating.”
“Did they talk to you?”
“I only gave them the barest essentials and didn’t reveal anything he’d told me. This is front page, right, Kevin?”
“Front page! Front page! Four-inch headline, Katie. Just like we do when war’s declared. Send the story right now and I’ll call you after I read it.”
She put down the phone, hesitated for a moment, hit the send key, and the e-mail sailed to the man. Just like when war’s declared. She thought about Shaw’s words. What if a world war happened? She felt a tingle shoot down her spine.
Gallagher called back twenty minutes later; she could sense his drool from across the ocean.
“We’ll run this in the morning edition,” he promised. “We still have time.” He added worriedly, “No chance we’ll get scooped?”
“Lesnik won’t be talking to anybody else, if that’s what you mean. But look, Kevin, I can’t absolutely prove that my contact was actually in the building that day. It’s all circumstantial. I have no corroborating source. That’s not how I usually do things.”
“There’s no way in hell he’d have those details if he hadn’t been in there, Katie. The London police haven’t released any of that information, and believe me we’ve tried to get it. And the fact that someone killed him? I think that’s proof enough. I’ve led off stories with less, just like every other newspaper. I mean look at the Duke lacrosse team and Richard Jewell fiascoes.”
“Operative word being fiasco, Kevin.” Katie suddenly wasn’t that certain anymore.
“Don’t worry. Here’s to your third Pulitzer, Katie. Go have a drink on me.”
Katie flinched. “I actually have a little problem in that regard. I thought you would’ve heard.”
“I did, but so what? Get wasted. A story like this deserves it.”
Whether it was this callous remark or something embedded deeply in Katie’s soul, there was a definite pop in her brain.
“Wait a minute, Kevin!”
“What?”
“You can’t print the story, not yet.”
“Are you kidding?”
“You wait until I call back and give you the go-ahead. I have to check out something first.”
“Katie! My instincts are telling me-”
“Shut up and listen,” she screamed into the phone. “You don’t have instincts. It was my ass running all over the world getting shot at while people like you sat behind your nice safe desk, okay? You don’t give a shit about anything other than selling newspapers. You will hold that story until I tell you otherwise. And if you screw me, I will personally come to your house and rip your face off. And now I’m going to hang up and go have that drink you so graciously suggested, you bastard!”
She threw down the phone in disgust, took a deep breath, and tried to stop shaking. A few minutes later she was in the hotel bar steeling herself with a whiskey soda for what she was about to do. And then she had a second one. A third would have followed, but she somehow wrenched herself off the barstool after watching a guy next to her pass out in his own drool.
She walked outside, passing the Charles Dickens House. It was one of the many residences that the author had occupied in London but the only one now used as a museum. She wondered if even Dickens’s prodigious imagination could have contemplated the absolute nightmare she found herself in. Probably she would have had to look to Kafka to do it justice.
She reached a small park, sat down on a bench, took out her cell phone, and called him.
He answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“Can we talk?”
“I thought you made your position perfectly clear already.”
“I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“Please, Shaw. It’s important.”
The café was near King’s Cross Station. She sat outside and waited for him, watching the “bendy-buses,” as Londoners had dubbed them. They had taken the place of the double-deckers and were basically two buses joined together by a flex joint. They were not liked very much by Londoners because they often clogged the city’s narrow intersections when making a turn.
That’s my life, thought Katie. I’ve got a dozen bendy-buses blocking every possible direction I could take.
She saw him before he saw her. Even with the wounded arm, he moved effortlessly, seeming to glide above the pavement like a heron over water, just waiting to strike. She rose and motioned to him.
She ordered some food; he only had coffee and a biscuit.
“Did you talk to the police?” he asked.
“Briefly. I only told them what I saw. I didn’t mention that I was there interviewing him. Not a can of worms I wanted to open. As far as they knew I was just a passerby.”
“They’ll know you lied to them when the story comes out. Which is when, by the way? I’m sure you’ve already written it.”
“I have. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
He sat back and looked expectant. “So talk.”
“I don’t want to start a World War III.”
Shaw took a sip of his coffee while Katie picked at her salad. Neither said anything for about a minute.
“What do you want to hear from me?” he said. “That you shouldn’t publish the story? I already told you that.”
“Do you really think the truth coming out will do more harm than good?”
“Yeah, I do. But let’s take a step back. We don’t know if what your story says is true.”
She bristled a bit. “How do you know? You haven’t read my story.”
“You didn’t let me,” he shot back. Then his tone softened. “Look, Katie, I’m sorry about what happened with Lesnik. I have no idea if he’s involved with the bad guys or not.”
“Someone gunning him down on the street probably shows he wasn’t involved with them. He knew the truth and so they tracked him down and killed him.”
“That theory has a few holes in it. How did they track him down? Why kill him? Because he might talk about the Russians? But it looked like they wanted him to.”
“We seem to be having the same discussion as last time.”
“Yeah, we do.” He sat back and looked everywhere except at her.
“Why did you come bursting into that hostel?”
“Let’s just say I was having a bad day.”
She gazed at him curiously.
He caught her look. “I went to see Anna’s body at the morgue.”
“Why would you do that?” she said incredulously.