Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [81]
‘I shouldn’t have to be rescued. The trap wasn’t set for me.’ He pushed his fists against his eyes and bent over in the chair, looking like a broken doll. ‘I don’t want to be rescued. Just leave me alone. Please.’
Benny stood up. There was nothing she could do to help him. Time would just tick on for Cristián, flavourless years following one another to the final catastrophe. Even his last moment of heroism wouldn’t matter, as Huitzilin reached out to kill him as casually as swatting a fly.
The anger grabbed hold of her feet and she strode across the echoing floor and out into the snow. If he looked up in surprise, watching her go, she didn’t see.
No more victims. No more victims!
‘No more victims!’ she shouted, kicking a beer can into the gutter. ‘Enough of this!’
* * *
Hyde Park was crammed with people. Ace’s taxi slid past the demonstration, faces reflected in the windows for a moment, gone again. The sound of bagpipes and drums rose over the noise of the crowd.
The taxi driver had been muttering under his breath all the way from St John’s Wood. Apparently London was on strike today – no phones, no post, no banks. Of course, taxi drivers had to keep on working, despite the demonstrators choking the streets as though they thought it was some sort of holiday. A bunch of anarchists, the lot of them.
A day of chaos, thought Ace. Appropriate.
She’d spent ages trying to hide a weapon under the minidress. In desperation she’d eventually stowed a gun in her handbag. When she reached for her purse to pay the driver, she discovered that the gun had been replaced by a large potato. Now that, she thought, was just downright unfair of the Doctor.
Savile Row was singing to itself. Ace watched the taxi go, waiting for the sound to resolve: guitars being tuned, microphones being tested. The noise seemed to come from all around. People in the street were craning their necks, trying to make out the source of the sounds. Men in ties and women in flowered blouses leaned out of windows.
Ace smiled. She remembered the time U2 had started performing on top of a building in LA, until the police had come – it had made a good video, anyway.
‘Okay,’ said John Lennon, his voice booming out over the street, and the sounds further clarified themselves into the beginning of a song.
Ace crossed the street and went into the building opposite Apple Corp. There was a lift. She took the stairs.
On the third floor she passed a typing pool crowded around a window, and paused to peer over their shoulders, unnoticed. Across the street, Apple’s roof was covered in wires and amplifiers. Paul was singing in that neat and tidy voice of his, long hair blowing in the wind. Ace spotted Yoko sitting to one side of the group, a small bundle of dark hair and clothes looking rather miserable in the cold.
And there was the man himself: long hair, sideburns, those trademark glasses, a fox fur coat. Like a photograph in 3D. She could see his fingers moving over the neck of the guitar, dancing from chord to chord.
The secretaries were saying what a surprise it was, how lucky they were to be there at just the right place and the right time to catch this little moment in history: the Beatles’ last concert. Ace left them behind, found another set of stairs.
How much had the Beatles thought about the dangers of taking to their roof? Probably they’d just bundled their equipment upstairs and gone for broke. After all, an assassin would have to be pretty quick off the mark to take advantage of something this impromptu. Unless, of course, they knew it was coming.
Top of the stairs. She kicked open the cleaners’ storeroom door.
It required one second to take in the random detail of the room, sink and shelves and boxes and buckets, another second to make out the shape of her quarry against