The Whole Truth (A. Shaw 1)

Shaw’s head rolled back and forth in Frank’s grasp. Frank glanced down at the deep tear in Shaw’s arm, ripped off his necktie, and fashioned a tourniquet above the wound.

“Hang on, Shaw, hang on, the EMTs are coming right now. Right now!”

He screamed at his men, “How the hell did these bastards find him? He was supposed to have cover!”

“Frank?” the faint voice said.

Frank looked down at Shaw, who was now staring up at him.

“Shaw, it’s gonna be okay. I hear the EMTs on the stairs.”

“Call Anna,” Shaw said, his breathing growing very shallow. “Call Anna for me.”

The EMTs burst into the room and surrounded Shaw and Frank. As Frank tried to pull away from Shaw, the injured man clutched at him with the little strength he had left.

“Call Anna. Please.”

“Right, I will. I’ll do it right now,” Frank said quickly.

Shaw drifted into unconsciousness and his arm fell to his side motionless.

A few minutes later they were hustling him out on a stretcher.

Victor the dragon-tattooed skinhead made his final exit in a body bag.

Frank watched from the window as the ambulance raced off. The room would be sterilized, the local police dealt with, and this would never appear on the French news. Frank mentally went through the steps of getting this done.

“Who’s Anna?” one of Frank’s men asked as he walked up to his boss.

Frank pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket and read the e-mail on the screen for the fourth time. “Urgent Alert: Attack on The Phoenix Group in London. No survivors.” That’s why he’d been trying to call Shaw at the hotel. When he didn’t get an answer he was on his way over to tell him in person when he’d gotten the distress signal from Shaw. He let out a deep breath as he surveyed the wreckage of the room. “Just a woman he was really close to.”

CHAPTER 42

KATIE JAMES WAS SITTING in her small apartment on the Upper West Side in New York staring at a bottle of gin she had placed carefully on her kitchen counter. An empty glass sat next to it. She put five ice cubes in the glass and then added two fingers of tonic. She sat back and examined what she had done so far. She swirled the tonic around with a spoon, the ice clinking enticingly against the sides of the glass. She eyed the bottle of gin. One drink, that was all. And didn’t she deserve it?

She had nearly been killed, for starters. And then she’d flown home to New York to find she’d been canned from her job on the death page due to budget concerns. They’d replaced her with a freelancer who was pushing eighty.

They’d also given her a hearty “Good luck, Katie!” as they had her escorted from the building by security. She wanted to run back in, take the Pulitzers she’d won, and cram them down their fat throats.

Instead, she’d come home and was staring at the gin. She would stop at one. She knew she could. She could just feel that she had the strength to stop at one. She unscrewed the top, smelled the delectable gin. She dropped a wedge of lime in the glass, swirled it around as she worked herself up for the final step, the adding of the Bombay Sapphire. It would be a toast to her new career – in what she didn’t yet know.

But that wasn’t the whole story. The thing was, when she was sober she saw Behnam in her dreams. The little Afghan boy who had died so that she could win her second Pulitzer always came to her when she slept. He seemed very much alive, his curly hair being lifted by a stifling desert wind. The smile on his face would melt the hardest heart, light the darkest night. But the dream always ended with him lying dead in her arms. Always dead was Behnam.

It was only when she was drunk that she didn’t see him. It was only when she was wasted that he stayed away. And that meant she had seen him pretty much every night over the last six months. He had died hundreds of times after being resurrected in her dreams three or four times a night. She was tired of the spectacle. She wanted a drink. No, she wanted to be drunk. She didn’t want to see Behnam alive and then dead.

As she sat back on her bare haunches, a ratty old sweatshirt her only clothing, she stared out the window. There was a rally going on in Central Park today. It was a protest against the Russian government. Tens of thousands of people were marching and waving “Remember Konstantin” flags. Katie couldn’t know the flags had been secretly delivered to the rally organizers by a firm working for a shell corporation with an untraceable connection to Pender amp; Associates. Twenty million of the flags had been manufactured and distributed throughout the world for rallies just like this one.

Katie had decided not attend the protest. She had other things on her mind.

She glanced away from the window and happened to stare through the blue glass of the gin bottle to the TV beyond.

Breaking news. Right. There was always breaking news. The next big story. In the recent past she’d already be on a plane, hurtling five hundred miles an hour right to the epicenter of the storm. And loving it. Loving every second of it until it was over and the next big story came along. And then the one after that in a psychotically charged, adrenaline-burning race that had no finish line.

London again. Well, London had its share of breaking news, though nothing bad had happened while Katie had been there. Just her luck. She took a deep breath and idly looked at the building with police tape all around it. It looked familiar. She sat up straighter and forgot about the gin.

What was the woman saying? Westminster? What group? Katie jumped to her feet, jogged into the living room, and turned up the sound.

The newsperson was standing in the rain while police and people in white uniforms raced here and there. A curious, neck-craning crowd was being held back by portable barriers. TV film crews were arrayed up and down the street, their satellite masts flinging the story electronically around the world one frantic byte and pixel at a time.