Delivering Caliban by Tim Stevens Read Free Book Online Page B

reaching Nina’s ears a fraction of a second after the door bulged at them. The second came before any of them had a chance to yell. This one was accompanied by a crack as the safety chain was yanked taut.
    Rachel pushed Nina so hard she stumbled. Nina made it to the end of the passage and stopped. At her feet was her violin in its case, where she’d propped it against the wall on her arrival. She lifted it. Kyle’s stance was one of dynamic indecision, the gun raised and aimed but his posture suggesting imminent flight. Rachel clung to his other arm.
    Over her shoulder Rachel shrieked, ‘ Go ,’ and the command was like a blow knocking Nina through the doorway and into not the bathroom, but Rachel and Kyle’s bedroom. Behind her the front door gave way in a roar of tearing timber that was drowned by yells.
    Nina strapped the violin case across her back, leapt over the bed and dragged the drapes apart as the first blast came, horribly close – a vague part of her understood it must have been Kyle who fired – and hauled at the sash window, ramming it upwards as far as it would go. The apartment was one storey up. Directly below was a concrete walkway at the rear of the block. The lawn was impossibly far away.
    She had one leg across the sill when noise exploded after her. She looked back. Rachel had backed into the room and was screaming. Beyond her Kyle came running in, except he wasn’t running, he was flying, propelled by something that was punching him along and flinging his limbs crazily. Rachel lurched towards Nina and she recoiled instinctively, dragging her other leg across the sill so that she was perched on her ass. The front of Rachel’s dress was a Rorschach of gore, her face a wide-eyed fright mask. Then Rachel spun through ninety degrees, the same forces that had turned Kyle into a bloody marionette having their way with her.
    Nina dropped through the cool evening air for an astonishingly brief moment before the shocking impact with the walkway drove pain through her ankles and her knees and up through her back and neck. She tipped forward, the violin on her back her baby, needing protection no matter what the cost to herself, and came to rest, with her face pressed against the concrete. She felt nothing; no heart hammering in her chest, no breath sawing in her throat.
    So this was death.
    She twisted her head round and peered up.
    High above her, God gazed down. A bald man with white, flashing eyes.
    Reborn, resurrected, Nina scrambled into a stooped, loping posture like an ape’s, every bone and muscle screaming defiance at her.
    She began to run.

Eight
     
    Hamburg
    Sunday 19 May, 6.20 pm
     
    ‘You’ll find everything you need in here.’
    Bracknell, the agent in the Service’s Hamburg station assigned to help Purkiss, had taken an instant dislike to him. He was used to the reaction, but the hostility wasn’t normally quite as undisguised as this. She barely made eye contact, ignored his proffered hand, and after leading him in silence to the tiny office they’d provided for him, slapped a memory stick down beside the antediluvian desktop computer.
    After she’d left – no tea or coffee was offered – Purkiss set to work. The stick contained details of all Pope’s operations during his time in Hamburg. As Gifford had said, Pope had been in the city two years and his work had involved humdrum if essential stuff: analysis of immigration patterns, the forging of connections with local agencies such as the police, the occasional background check on up-and-coming local political figures. No liaison, officially or otherwise, with the city’s CIA presence, as far as Purkiss could tell.
    Vale had also arranged for the Hamburg station to provide whatever was known about the local CIA structure and personnel, and this too was on the memory stick. It proved even less useful than the material about Pope. Neither Jablonsky’s nor Taylor’s names came up, and there was no suggestion of any overlap