The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  Sam turns to her, his eyes soft, frightened. He’s unable to make a decision, and words won’t work. Kat smashes his left wrist against the steering wheel.

  She draws on every ounce of cold cruelty she can find. “Unlock it, Sam.” With his right hand, he presses a button under the dash.

  Kat watches through the side mirror and the windshield. The guards step forward, confused. Luxton shouts something in Russian. He comes into Kat’s view. He’s carrying two weapons. The yellow jacket is open. He’s relaxed, sweeping his arms about.

  One of the guards on the ground brings up his weapon. The guard at the top of the steps is on a cell phone call. He goes rigid.

  Luxton shoots him first. Then he shoots the two guards on the ground. Kat sees the glint of ejecting shell cases. Six in all. Two rounds each target. Silence-shattering explosions, which spread throughout the base. Kat checks the watchtowers and the gatehouse. Nothing. But they have seconds to take it to the next level.

  Luxton opens the driver’s door, pulls Sam out, and gets in. Kat presses redial on Lev’s phone, gives it to Luxton. Luxton accelerates smoothly, brings the truck around in a long curve toward the middle hangar.

  Yulya answers on the second ring. She starts screaming questions in Russian again.

  The truck’s 350 yards from the hangar, picking up speed.

  “Lev? Lev?” shouts Yulya.

  Luxton replies in Russian. Thirty seconds, and they’ll be there. A spotlight shines inside the hangar. Kat sees two figures. The plane’s a Gulfstream executive jet. There’s a helicopter behind it. She can’t see any hostages.

  “Lev—”

  “This is the British police, Miss Gracheva,” says Luxton, switching to English. “It’s over. You and your men—”

  The windshield shatters. Luxton falls over the wheel. The truck slows, and Kat’s screaming out, “Mike! Mike!” Her hands are on the wheel, dragging it under his weight. The side of his head is bloodied. He’s lifeless, but his foot’s locked down on the gas pedal.

  A second shot hits the cab wall above Kat’s head. The truck’s veering in a circle, about to lose balance and tip.

  Kat leans across Luxton, pushes up the door handle. As the door gives, Luxton shifts, but not enough to bring back the wheel. She screams again, primal and deep, to gather all her weight. She pushes him out onto the tarmac, doesn’t look back, doesn’t want to see.

  Kat has control of the wheel. Another bullet hole appears in the driver’s side window. She flinches and ducks. The window’s safety glass spiderwebs and cascades inward.

  Kat glimpses Yulya at the door of the hangar with a rifle. Hunched down behind the wheel and dashboard, Kat stomps the accelerator to the floor.

  A round hits the engine block. Two more fly high, over Kat’s head.

  Yulya’s nearly in front of her. Kat edges the wheel to hit her. Yulya jumps aside, and the truck goes inside the hangar. The searchlight sears Kat’s retinas. She turns her head from it and hears a new burst of automatic fire.

  The truck skews around to the right, its back tire shot out. Kat tries to correct the pull, but she can’t. The truck’s skidding in a tight circle. She breathes in burned rubber and sees the hangar swing around in front of her, the wing of the Gulfstream, a glimpse of the helicopter, wooden cargo crates stacked by the walls, a crack of light from the closed doors at the other end. She hears gunshot echoes.

  She eases off the gas to get back the balance. From the handling, she judges that the tires of two wheels are blown. She can’t see Yulya. But she sees Viktor, his face playful, like Yulya’s, alight with a cruel grin.

  Then framed in the windshield, she looks straight into the eyes of her father, watery, his expression old, understanding, proud. He, Sayer, Liz, and Max stare up at her from less than 100 feet away, tied up, unable to move, directly in the path of the truck.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Saturday, 12:49 p.m., BST

  Kat accelerates, swings the wheel hard left, and pulls on the hand brake. The truck tips. The back lurches around, and the vehicle goes up on two wheels. Kat slides across the seat, adding her weight to the momentum. A spinning tire sweeps an inch past Sayer’s face and hits a cargo crate, which bounces the truck farther over. It crashes onto its side. The windshield bursts. An air bag pushes Kat back against the seat, twisting her head around.

  The truck rolls onto its roof and settles. The cab frame buckles. The air bag deflates, leaving nylon tangled around her. Kat’s lying on the dented inside of the roof. The glove compartment springs open. Papers scatter. A grenade tumbles onto her stomach. She feels the barrel of the Remington shotgun. Ashes from Sam’s cigarette butts fall onto her face and get into her mouth.

  Straight ahead of her is the undercarriage of the Gulfstream jet; to her right, a stack of crates. Her left hand hangs out the window, wedged because of her position. She can see Sayer’s legs and the bare feet of Liz next to him.

  The truck didn’t crush them. She’s bought everybody a few more minutes of life. She remembers herself pushing Luxton out of the cab—wounded or dead, she doesn’t know. She thinks of Sam and feels sorry for him. She sees the three guards by the plane, falling to Luxton’s gunfire, one after another. She summons Mercedes Vendetta. Don’t go battling guilt. Yeah, right. Don’t regret. Don’t think back.

  She manages to turn her body slightly, taking off pressure from the Remington pressing into her left hip. She smells gunpowder. But no one’s been shooting inside. It must be the potassium nitrate from the air bag. She smells tire rubber and gasoline, and she sees a stain on the concrete as it leaks from the tank toward her.

  But the concrete in front of her darkens with something else. White sneakers with a red streak up the side appear, red socks, and the hem of fresh blue denim. She tries to look up, but can’t get the angle.

  Yulya crouches right down so that Kat can see her properly.

  “You okay, Kat?” she says softly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out.”

  Kat doesn’t speak.

  “The way they maintain these trucks, sooner or later, someone was bound to have an accident,” says Yulya.

  Yulya speaks into a cell phone. “We’ve got them,” she says. “No. Fine. Leave us.” Yulya closes the phone. “You heard that, Kat? We’ll end this my way.”

  She leans her rifle next to the cab windshield. Kat can tell what it is from the wooden buttstock, skeletonized with two carved holes in it—a VSS, Vintovka Snaiperskaja Spetsialnaya, or special sniper rifle, the type Sayer matched to the round used to kill Suzy, the type used to shoot Luxton, the type deliberately brought into Kat’s field of view to taunt her.

  Yulya lifts up Kat’s left hand, with Suzy’s ring on it. Her tone becomes soft and friendly again. “Oh my God,” she says. “The family heirloom.” She rests Kat’s fingers delicately on hers like a manicurist. “What I’m going to do is save the ring, then get you out of here.”

  Yulya’s fingers tighten around the ring. Kat resists. Yulya lets go and steps back an inch. “Oh, Kat. Dear Kat. How I do like you.” She moves out of view and stands up. “Viktor,” she shouts.

  She doesn’t need the ring from Kat to kill her. She killed Suzy first and took it after. But she wants to break Kat before killing her. She’ll do that by making Kat watch her father and the others die. As Kat judged, Yulya wants a ceremony, a ritualistic series of deaths, ending with Kat.

  Yulya squats down again. “Why don’t we do this like a visit to the dentist? Viktor cuts the ring off your finger while you relax and watch TV. They’re signing the CPS now. Why don’t we watch it?”

  Kat shifts another inch, freeing up her right hand pinned underneath her. A large, wide screen is lowered in front of her. She sees the hands of the two men carrying it, but not their faces. They lean it against the cargo crates. A wire trails from the left-hand edge.

  The picture shows Hampton Court’s Great Hall filled with politicians, some seated, some standing behind a long, dark, wood table. Three raised lecterns at th
e front are decorated with the national flags of the United States, China, and Russia.

  The image flickers and the screen splits. On the left is the London soccer stadium, looking like a huge silver spaceship with a sword-thin, glistening arch curving over the field. Outside, fans draped in the red-on-white cross of the England flag pace around. Inside, the crowd cheers as the England team runs onto the field.

  Delegates at the CPS ceremony look up as the three presidents of the world’s official new superpowers step forward to take their places at their individual podiums. Abbott’s face is rigid and serious. He’s wearing a charcoal gray suit with a pale blue shirt. He touches his earpiece. His eyes drop, but he doesn’t break his step. His hand goes into his jacket pocket, and he brings out a pen.

  The camera cuts away to others in the hall. “See there,” says Yulya. Her finger is on the right-hand screen, just above a small, attractive, middle-aged woman in a white pantsuit, sitting behind the Russian president. “That’s my mom. She’ll be saying a few words after the signing.”

  In the top right-hand corner, a digital clock tells Kat it is 12:56:14. The ceremony is due to end in less than four minutes.

  “John,” shouts Yulya. “Do you see her? Remember fucking her and ending up with Max? Do you see Mom there, Max? First time you’ve ever seen Mom and your real dad together.”

  Yulya’s sitting on the floor, arms drawing up her knees and a pistol hanging loosely in her hands. She’s next to Kat, engrossed in the screen. Viktor sits on the other side. He has a double-bladed knife, plain on one edge and serrated on the other. He takes hold of Kat’s left hand.

  “Your buddy, Lev,” Kat says to Viktor, “he’s dead. She told you, did she?”

  As Kat speaks, she pushes her right hand down to her hip and gets her fingers out of their cramped position. She makes sure the shotgun’s safety is disengaged.

  Viktor grips her more tightly and splays out her ring finger, separating it from the others.

  Kat’s fired a Remington 870 in training. But that was with earmuffs, breakfast, a good night’s sleep, and a target at 35 yards. She knows it can be a destructive and decisive short-range weapon. She knows the barrel digging into her waist, which she’s maneuvering toward Viktor, is only 18 inches long. She knows the gun’s loaded with seven cartridges of double-ought buckshot, because she watched Luxton load it. She knows the end of the barrel is hidden by the air bag nylon, and she knows the safety’s off. What she doesn’t know is that the shotgun’s rigged with an automatic-fire capability.

  Viktor lowers the knife blade toward her finger. Kat pulls the trigger.

  Four cartridges fire at point-blank range, cutting through Viktor in succession as the heat of the barrel burns her from below. The roar takes her hearing, but Viktor disappears into a mist of white and red, his left hand still holding Kat’s. She crawls out of the cab. Unhooks herself from Viktor’s mangled body. Coughs on the smoke. Sees Liz choking on gunsmoke but unharmed.

  Automatic gunfire hits one of Yulya’s men, lying wounded on the ground. Far away, Luxton is propped up against the entrance of the hangar. He fires again. Another man falls. The hangar goes quiet. Completely silent.

  There’s no sign of Yulya.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Saturday, 12:58 p.m., BST

  K-kat, over there,” shouts Liz. “His knife.”

  Kat sees Viktor’s knife wedged under a box. She gets it, kneels, and cuts the ropes holding the four hostages together. She cuts the bonds around Sayer’s hands, then gives him the knife to free the others.

  She picks up the shotgun. Luxton looks weak, but is still standing. From the blood on his head and shoulders, Kat can’t work out where he’s hurt. He doesn’t move. Maybe he can’t. Maybe he’s covering her.

  “Where is she?” Kat shouts to him.

  She turns and turns, taking in the hangar in 360-degree sweeps. She should have three shells left in the Remington, but it’s only an effective weapon close-up, and the hangar’s cavernous.

  Her father pushes himself to his feet. Sayer’s helping Liz up. Grachev looks at no one, but walks stiffly toward the shattered cab of the truck.

  The TV set, damaged by gunfire, has gone blank. But she remembers seeing it at 12:56:14. She breaks into a run.

  “The cell phone,” she shouts to Luxton. “Did you—”

  The phone’s in his bloodied, outstretched hand. She takes it on the run and emerges on the vast, hot, quiet apron of the airfield. The last satellite window opened at 12:42. Plus twelve minutes before it closes makes 12:54. And they’ve driven seventy miles south, which will make a difference.

  It must be about 12:58. She’s missed any chance of getting the images to Abbott before he flew to Hampton Court, and it’s two minutes from the CPS signing.

  The sun’s so strong she can’t see the phone’s keypad properly. She punches Cage’s numbers anyway.

  Cage picks up. “Kat, Kat. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Did we miss it?”

  “What the hell’s happening there?”

  “Did we fucking miss it?”

  “No. There’s been a delay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve got three minutes and the satellite window’s still open.”

  She lowers herself to the ground and sits cross-legged. Three minutes on a day like today is two lifetimes.

  “I’m playing you a live feed from Hampton Court,” says Cage.

  Kat cups her hand to block sunlight from the tiny LCD screen of the cell phone. It shows Abbott onstage, hands on each side of the podium, turning, talking to the Chinese president. He laughs, turns back, and glances at the lectern.

  “You ready?” asks Cage. “Stay absolutely still. If you move you’ll risk losing the uplink.”

  “Go,” says Kat, pushing the Unlock button on Suzy’s ring.

  “Coming through,” says Cage.

  Kat hears an engine noise from somewhere straight out of the sun. She can’t see it. She can’t put up her hand as a visor. She can’t move because of the ring.

  “Kat, to your left.” Cage’s voice is sharp, close to panic. “Vehicle.”

  “Are the pictures coming through?”

  “Move!”

  A jeep’s coming straight toward her. It’s marked with the RingSet logo. Yulya’s driving, her hair windblown under a red hat.

  “Kat!” Cage is screaming now.

  She glances back at the screen. “Is it through?” Then back at Yulya, whose left hand’s on the wheel, her right holding some kind of weapon.

  Kat doesn’t move. She holds the ring absolutely still. “Can Abbott see it yet?”

  The jeep’s engine roar drowns Cage’s response. Through heat-haze ripples, Kat sees Max Grachev outside the hangar with a rifle resting on the hood of a truck, white flashes jumping from the barrel.

  One moment Yulya’s face has the shape of a smile. Then a flame curls around from the back of the vehicle, and suddenly the jeep’s engulfed in fire, and Yulya is screaming, her skin stretched across her face like a mask.

  But the jeep keeps coming toward Kat, a streaking ball of burning fuel from the punctured tank.

  Yulya jumps clear, tumbling over the tarmac, the flames around her like a water line, her front untouched but her back burning. She lets off two rounds in Kat’s direction but they fly wide, then she rolls on the airfield apron to try to put out the fire.

  “How we doing, Bill?” Kat hasn’t moved.

  “Signal disruption,” Cage replies. “You okay?”

  “How much they get?”

  “No way to tell.”

  The sunlight makes it impossible for Kat to see what Abbott’s doing.

  “Is Abbott reacting?”

  “No.”

  Kat’s not going to move until The History Book is delivered. Her mind is on the prisoners on Voz Island, on the families separated and murdered, on Suzy’s dead but perfectly serene face staring up at her in the morgue with her s
kull torn out by one of Yulya’s bullets.

  Yulya’s prone, legs splayed like a sniper, less than 200 yards away. Only a stream of black smoke cuts across her line of vision. Kat hears the crack of rifle fire.

  “Update, Bill.” Her voice is tight. If she reaches for the Remington by her side, makes any movement at all, the transmission will fail. Yet if Yulya hits her, she’ll move anyway and the transmission will fail.

  “Six seconds.”

  Another crack. A whining ricochet from ten feet away.

  “Four seconds.”

  Two shots. One skips fifteen feet from her, the other two feet.

  The wind’s blowing the smoke higher, clearing Yulya’s line of sight.

  “It’s in,” says Cage. “Move. Move. Move.”

  Kat rolls to her right as a five-round burst chews up the surface where she’s been sitting. She picks up the Remington and moves forward, right, then left, to deny Yulya a clear shot. For her buckshot to be lethal she has to get within thirty yards of Yulya.

  But fifty yards out the jeep’s fuel tank explodes. A wall of hot air hits Kat, and her right foot jars against something on the ground. She trips, topples forward with heat surging around her, breaks her fall, and the Remington smashes from her grip, skids along the ground, and fires off a burst of its last three rounds.

  Kat scrambles to her feet, taking refuge in the new, thicker smoke cloud from the burning jeep. She runs with the smoke, her throat rasping, her eyes stinging, trying to get behind Yulya, except Yulya’s watching, staying exactly where she is, because as soon as the smoke clears, Yulya will kill Kat. It’s just a matter of time, seconds only, which is why as the sunlight jumps through the burning haze, making the colors around the airfield textured and strange, Kat sees Yulya waiting, confident of her target, her lips turned into a smirk of victory.

  Kat has one weapon left. As she runs, she tests it on her fingers. It’ll work, but only if she gets close enough to use absolute force.

  She circles, putting the burning jeep between her and Yulya, and she can see clearly back toward the hangar, where Grachev’s still leaning over the truck hood, his rifle silent. The same man who killed the helicopter pilot at the limit of his range, whose shots blew out the jeep’s tires and ripped through its fuel tank, cannot bring himself to fire directly on his sister.