Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

  “That train’s not going the right way.”

  I cut through to the other track. “We can switch at the next stop.”

  She looked up with increasing relief, and increasing fright, if that was possible. “I thought you were hurt; I saw that car run into you.” Red splotches marked her cheeks. “And I got lost trying to find Goodhew Waites, and then that man wasn’t Mr. Goodhew, and . . .”

  “I know. Hang tight.” I pulled us into the center of the crowd. “What’s at White City?”

  “The BBC.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Mum says it has lots of cameras everywhere, and a thousand journalists. ‘Stand outside and don’t stop screaming. ’ ”

  Above the platform the sign flashed: TRAIN APPROACHING. Sound clattered from the tunnel, and headlights reflected off the curved tunnel walls. With a rush of air the train rattled into the station. As soon as the doors slid open we jumped on.

  I pulled her along the crowded carriage. Businessmen wore iPods and bent their heads to newspapers. Teenage boys with earrings held crumpled Burger King bags, talking what seemed a language as foreign as Thai. Stout tourists from Chicago clutched tube maps, wearing Reeboks, jeans as big as sails, and red-white-and-blue sweatshirts.

  I headed for the front of the train. People continued crowding aboard. The doors began beeping.

  “Are we going to get away?” Georgie said.

  Or die trying. “Yes. Hang onto me.”

  The doors slid closed. The train pulled out, throwing me off balance. I grabbed the handrail above my head, steadied myself, and kept going. The train lurched and swayed. The electric roar of the wheels rose as we accelerated. The movie and travel posters outside strobed by, the station blurred past, and we rolled into the abrupt darkness of the tunnel. I knew only that we were ahead of Shiver and had to keep it that way.

  Georgie tugged on my arm. “Kit, look.”

  She pointed back down the train. The windows at the ends of the carriage gave a clear view of the cars behind. The tunnel created an optical illusion, the sense that this carriage was holding still and the ones behind were rocking maniacally, swinging wildly to the side when we turned, like kids in a game of Crack the Whip. We straightened and I saw through the next carriage to the one behind that.

  “Shit.”

  I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but Shiver was weaving between passengers, coming like a tendril of smoke, pale and heated, eyes locked on Georgie.

  The train braked, sharply, and I held hard to the handrail as Georgie swung against me. We pulled into the next station. The doors opened. Passengers streamed off, but Shiver continued working toward us.

  Georgie tugged on my arm. “We have to get out. We can change trains and lose her.”

  Damn, she was brave. “Yes, but not here. Come on. We’re going to trick her.”

  I pulled her along the carriage. Passengers flowed out the doors as if through a bleeding wound, and the crowd aboard the train momentarily thinned. Reaching the door at the end of the carriage, we hurried through to the car ahead.

  “We need to get off,” Georgie said.

  “We will.”

  We rushed along the carriage. A new crowd gushed aboard from the platform, jostling us. The doors began beeping.

  “Now. They’re going to close,” she said.

  I glanced back. Shiver threw open the door at the end of the carriage and pushed toward us through the mass of people, twenty feet back. A final rush of passengers jumped on board, jumbling into me. They knocked me sideways, bumping my backpack off my right shoulder and throwing me off balance. I wrangled past them toward the doors.

  “Kit, we need to get off.”

  Behind us, a clot of black coats had blocked Shiver between the two rows of seats.

  “Now,” I said.

  I swung Georgie out the doors ahead of me just as they slid shut.

  She landed on the platform. The doors closed on my backpack. I felt myself caught, and twisted, pulling, thinking, No, not now, not this—I couldn’t lose my laptop. And my feet were a and a half ahead of my shoulders and planted awkwardly on that big sign that read MIND THE GAP.

  “Kit!”

  Georgie clasped my hand and tried to grab my backpack. Shiver bled free of the crowd and rushed forward.

  Georgie tugged. “You’re stuck, Kit; the train’s going to go. She’s coming, oh, Kit.”

  It was hopeless. I twisted out of my pack and broke free, staggering for balance. The doors opened and I saw it lying on the floor of the train. People stared but nobody touched it. Georgie bunched as though to grab it. Shiver worked her way down the aisle toward the door.

  “No, Georgie. Run.” I shoved her toward the stairs.

  The doors shut tight and the beeping stopped. I stared through the window. Inside the carriage Shiver stared straight back at me, surrounded by oblivious passengers, helpless and trapped. I took a step back.

  She raised her arm. In her right hand she held Jax’s specialist knife. She leaped at the window and rammed the hilt against the safety glass. It shattered white.

  Inside the carriage, people leaped to their feet and scattered away from the window, shouting and shoving clear of Shiver. I stood frozen on the platform, hair on end.

  Georgie cried from the stairs, “Kit, come on.”

  The window of the train had crazed white. I saw Shiver leap and grab the handrail above her head. She swung her feet like a gymnast and kicked at the glass. Once, twice, three times, and the window sagged and fell out.

  “Kit.”

  An alarm sounded. People scattered off the platform. We joined them, ran up a flight of stairs and around a corner into a high-ceilinged hall. My shoulders fell. There was another long escalator. I could barely breathe, and my legs were practically shaking with fatigue. Behind us we heard shouts.

  “Up,” I said.

  I pushed Georgie ahead of me, struggling to run. Passengers coming down watched with confusion, and some began to turn around and march up the down escalator. Georgie jogged ahead of me, ponytail and backpack bouncing. I gripped the rail, pulling myself up step by step. Two flights, three flights, and finally we hit the top and ran into the station, still belowground. It was packed with people, jammed with tiny newsstands and cheap sandwich kiosks and photo booths. We pushed through the barriers and out, saw a staircase where sunlight poured down the steps, beckoning to us. I held tight to Georgie’s hand and we stumbled up to the street.

  The street was heaving with people, a manic intersection where traffic roared past in all directions. The sun was glaring off the granite walls of the buildings, the sky searing blue.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “Oxford Circus.”

  I pulled her toward a crosswalk. The traffic light was yellow. I read the sign on the road saying LOOK RIGHT, checked, and yanked her halfway across the road to an island in the center. The light turned red. We stopped and I looked back. Traffic dinned into action and taxis, trucks, and motorcycles sliced past behind and in front of us. With a rush of air, a bus swept by two feet from my face, a thunderous wall of red.

  Behind it there was a break in the traffic. Looking left, I yanked Georgie with me across the second half of the road. A Ferrari laid on its horn. I threw Georgie toward the sidewalk and jumped out of its way. It whined past, followed by a long roll of black cabs. The crowd bustled around us. We looked back.

  Shiver was on the far side of the street, waiting for the light. Cars and trucks and buses streamed between us in both directions along Oxford Street, obscuring her, revealing her, like another optical illusion, streaks giving me only enough of a glimpse to think that she still had the knife in her hand. She checked left and ran halfway across the street to the island. Every nerve in my body went cold.

  I grabbed Georgie by the shoulders and pulled her against my chest. Hold still for five seconds. Georgie tried to look back, but I put a hand on her head, held her tight, and pressed her face into my shoulder.

>   “Don’t watch,” I said.

  Shiver checked right and saw the clear street, turned to stare straight at me, and ran into the road. The double-decker bus hit her going full speed.

  30

  Dazed, hanging tight to Georgie, I walked down Regent Street, just putting one foot in front of the other. She had cinched her arm around my waist and was clutching my sweater beneath her fingers. Above the stone walls of the stores along the street, the sky was acrylic blue. Behind us sirens echoed. Police officers ran toward Oxford Circus, shouting into their shoulder-mounted radios, their flak jackets and heavy equipment belts humping up and down. Georgie was no longer trying to look back at Oxford Street. She had seen the face of the bus driver, warped and glazed through his cracked windshield. She had seen the furrow in the front end of the bus. I had rushed her away from the scene before she could see the broken bundle up the street, black hair fanned across the road.

  I couldn’t let go of her. What else did she have to hold on to? She couldn’t go back to school, not as long as Christian was on the loose, not as long as Rio Sanger knew that she was enrolled.

  She couldn’t go to her mother. We had heard nothing from Jax.

  And I was in trouble so deep, I would never climb out. I had lost my laptop.

  I felt it like a fist to my ribs. All this way, all this effort, my life tossed overboard to rescue Dad, and I had lost my laptop on the tube. I couldn’t possibly retrieve it now, not from the floor of the underground car where Shiver had smashed out the window.

  Other passengers had undoubtedly left belongings behind in their panic to escape, but the police would have shut the platform, cordoned off the train, would be collecting everybody’s things to see what could be tied to the manic attacker or the people she was chasing.

  CCTV. Oh, God. Cameras were everywhere. They would get the footage and match it to me and Georgie in a heartbeat. They’d see me get stuck in the doors and drop the pack in my rush to get away. There would be no question that Shiver smashed the window so she could chase us.

  They wouldn’t find any identification in my backpack, because both my passports were in my pocket. But they would find the dossiers and my computer.

  I pressed my fist to my mouth, fighting back despair.

  Everything was on my computer. Not only the files I needed to rescue Dad, but information I needed to get Georgie out of the country. There was one flash drive left and half an hour remaining to find it—and Jax had told me that the only way to get Georgie safely to the U.S. was to obtain it. But without the rest of the Riverbend program, that single flash drive would be useless.

  The street, the bustling crowd, the gleaming storefront windows, and the crystalline sky all swam before my vision. I was going to have to turn myself in. I would have to go to the embassy and see if the FBI liaison would allow me to surrender myself into their custody.

  Georgie tugged on my sleeve. She seemed thinner than I had reckoned, so vulnerable, and trembling with the cold. I hitched my arm tighter around her shoulder.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “To find a quiet place where I can make a phone call.”

  It sounded lame even to me. She gazed up. Her look was slow and hard, a showdown look, edgy and familiar—American despite her Englishness.

  “Why did that man call you Evan?”

  There was nothing for it. If I was certain of anything at this stage, it was that lying to this girl would be a fatal mistake.

  “It’s my middle name. It’s what I usually go by.”

  “So you’re not Kit at all.”

  Young girls can dispense acid with such incredible purity. “Kit’s a nickname from when I was a kid. My first name’s Kathleen, and it’s what . . .” I had to breathe against the catch in my throat. “It’s what my dad calls me.” I looked at her again. “He’s a friend of your mom’s too.”

  Tears rose in her eyes, shining under the sun. I wiped them away with my thumb.

  “We’re going to go someplace where I can make some calls and figure out where your mom is, all right?”

  She nodded. Her bottom lip juddered and her shoulders dropped. God, what things she didn’t know. That her life was wrought in violence and her family sworn to lies. Jax had tried to shield her from it behind convent walls, but she had been thrown into the heat storm anyway. She softened and bent to me, letting me hold her up. Around us people walked and chatted and pushed past, sweeping us along like leaves caught in a current, flowing helplessly toward the sea.

  Christian walked down the street, holding his arm to his chest. He was crashing. The speed was back at the hotel room. He didn’t want to think about what was behind him in Grosvenor Square.

  That hadn’t really happened, had it? God, he had to lie down. Lie down and sleep. What was Rio thinking, sending him to fucking London to do this thing?

  He broke into a lope, running down the block past these fabulous mansions, looking for his rented Aston Martin. Sirens moaned on the wind. The sun hurt his eyes. He was hungry. He was bleeding.

  Weak, he needed blood. Needed the glass, and his works, but most of all needed blood. He needed his baby sister, and she had gotten away. He started to rub his hand over his cashmere sweater, but his hand wasn’t working right.

  Tim North. That wasn’t actually him, was it? He glanced back toward the square. All those people watching him, eyes on him, staring.

  A police car turned onto the road and sped toward him. He slowed to a walk and cut around a corner, heading off in another direction. Where had he parked? Someplace past a bunch of scaffolding and construction materials. Not this street.

  He stumbled on. He saw his torn knuckles, pulled his hand out from beneath his coat, and looked at the odd way it hung from the wrist, that funny bump and the weird swellings. Rio would kill him. He had let a cripple break his thumb.

  He couldn’t see the guy anymore and wasn’t going back. All those people staring at him, watching from the edges of the square, from the park benches—he wasn’t going back. He would leave the guy. He would leave him where he was.

  Spotting a café down a side street, I took Georgie inside and settled her at a table in a corner.

  “Give me your phone.”

  When she handed it over, I turned it off and removed the battery.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I think the woman who chased us was tracking your location with the phone.”

  “Oh.” Her jaw went tight.

  “Let me see your backpack.”

  I took everything out and searched it. My spirits sank even further. Deep in a pocket, beneath chewing gum and nubby pencils, I found a bug the size of a shirt button. I put it on the hardwood floor, set the leg of my chair on top of it, and crushed it.

  Georgie was so wide-eyed and tense that I attempted a smile and wiped the salt and coffee stains off the tabletop, simply for something menial and ordinary to do. Light from the big windows along the front of the café caught one side of her face.

  “How about some hot chocolate?” I said.

  She nodded. Caught between sunlight and shadow, her face looked older, hinting at the woman she would become. When she outgrew the coltishness, she was going to be striking. And something about her seemed bound for the sky. I saw Jax in her rich brown skin and the feline focus of her eyes. They were the deepest brown I had ever seen, and they were dry.

  The door to the café burst open. In the entryway, breathless and flushed with cold, stood P.J.

  “Evan. I ran after you from Grosvenor Square and—”

  “Oh, my God.” I leaped to my feet.

  “I got to the tube station and I saw the whole thing. I got on the train behind you.” He rushed toward me. “That woman smashed the window; I saw all of it.”

  I flung my arms around him. I felt my legs weaken, was aware that he didn’t know where to put his hands.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He had my backpack. I took it from him, clasping it to my chest.<
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  “How did you get it?”

  “I was in the car behind you on the train. When everybody stampeded off, it got kicked out the door.” His hands were freckled red with nicks and cuts. “I found it on the tracks between the train and the platform.”

  He began brushing dust and bits of glass from his shirt. He looked up, his blue eyes dismayed. “I didn’t hit you with the rental car on purpose.”

  “I know.” I clasped his arm. “Thank you. You have no idea how important this is.” I pulled him over to the table. “This is Georgie. Georgie, P. J. Blackburn.”

  She eyed him. “You were in Grosvenor Square.”

  He lifted his chin in greeting. “You’ve got wheels, girl. I couldn’t keep up.”

  “Where’s Jesse?” I said.

  “I was hoping he’d be here with you.”

  He must not have liked the expression on my face. He reddened, and an old look came over him, cagey and defensive.

  “He told me to go after Georgie, so I did,” he said.

  My nerves drew tight. I hiked my backpack onto my shoulders and beckoned to Georgie. “Come on; we need to get somewhere. Fast.”

  By the time we hit the sidewalk, the phone was pressed to my ear. Jesse didn’t answer.

  I hustled toward Regent Street. “We only have twenty-five minutes. We need a cab.”

  “No luck getting Jesse?” P.J. said.

  “No.”

  His eyes, which looked so much like his brother’s, took on a hard sheen in the sunlight. “I’ll go back to Grosvenor Square.”

  “No.” My stomach was knotting all over again. I gave him a desperate look. “I need you to help watch out for Georgie.”

  Her voice piped in. “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes. I want him with us.”

  She pointed. “I mean you don’t need to go back to Grosvenor Square. Isn’t that him?”

  P.J. and I turned. Stopped in traffic on Regent Street was a silver Aston Martin DB9, the most beautiful car I had ever seen. In the passenger seat, a young man with an ear-ring and a baseball cap was leaning out the window trying to see what was jamming up the traffic. Behind the wheel, so was Jesse.