Sam Bourne 4-Book Thriller Collection. Sam Bourne
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those guys. We called them the Apostles, hanging around Johnson like he was the Messiah or something. For anyone interested, I’ve scanned in a picture from the Yale Daily News which shows Johnson and his followers. Click here.
Will clicked and waited for the picture to load. It was grainy, in drab, 1970s colour and it took a while to fill the frame. Slowly it came into view. At the centre, wearing a broad grin, like the captain of a college football team, was a man in his late thirties, wearing an open-necked shirt and large glasses with the curved, rectangular frames that were then regarded as super-modern. He wore no dog-collar, no dark suit. He was, Will concluded, what the Victorians would have called a muscular Christian.
Surrounding him were young, serious-looking men, exuding that born-to-rule confidence that radiated out of Yale or Harvard yearbooks. The hair was long or bulky, the shirt collars and jacket lapels wide. The faces seemed to shine with possibility. These men were not only going to rule the world. It was quite clear they believed they would do it with Jesus’s blessing.
‘I think you need to hurry,’ said Tom, now taking up Will’s previous position by the curtain. ‘There’s a car outside. Two guys are getting out and coming into the building.’
But Will was hardly listening. Instead he was pushed back into his seat with surprise: he had recognized one of the faces in the photograph. He was only able to because he had seen another, different picture of this same man in his youth recently. The paper had run it when he was appointed. There, at Jim Johnson’s side, was none other than Townsend McDougal – the future editor of the New York Times.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Will said.
‘It’s him, isn’t it?’
Will was confused. How would TC recognize McDougal?
‘I didn’t want to say, because I wasn’t sure. But it really couldn’t be anyone else.’
Will looked up at her, crinkling his eyebrows to register his puzzlement. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘Will! They’re coming up. You’ve got to go!’
‘Look,’ said TC, taking her finger to the far left of the back row of the picture – an area Will had barely examined. TC stopped at a lean, handsome young man with a full head of thick hair. He was unsmiling.
‘Maybe I’m wrong, Will. But I think that’s your father.’
Monday, 2.56pm, Brooklyn
Tom had fairly wrenched Will from the chair and out the window, sending him plunging down the fire escape. He nudged TC the same way and was about to follow himself when he looked back. The computer screen was still alight with information. It would be too terrible, thought Tom, if his machine, always such a loyal ally, were to end up giving them all away.
He rushed TC out, then moved over to the desk and started frantically closing down programmes. It was while he was shutting down the internet browser that the door flung open.
He heard it before he saw it, a splintering crash, as two men shouldered their way into the apartment. Tom looked up and saw one of them: tall, thick-armed and with the clearest, sharpest blue eyes. In an instant, Tom decided to do the one thing his every instinct rebelled against. He reached for the power cord and pulled it out of the wall, shutting down his computer and everything connected to it.
But the move was too sudden for his uninvited guests. They interpreted a man stretching downwards the way they had been trained to, as someone reaching for a weapon. As he pulled on the white flex, the bullet pierced his chest. He crumpled to the ground. The screens went dark.
Will charged down the back ladder, taking two then three rungs at a time. His head was throbbing. Who was chasing him? What had happened to TC and Tom? Where should he go?
But even as he thundered downwards, storey after storey, his mind was racing with what he had just seen. The face was unmistakable; TC had seen it straight away. What Freudian impulse had led his eye away from it? The eyes, the jaw, the firm nose: his father.
And yet, the one thing he knew for certain about William Monroe Sr was that he was an avowed rationalist, a coolly secular man whose scepticism about religion might well have thwarted his highest ambition, to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Could he really have once been a bible-thumper, and such a serious one?
Three more storeys to go, and now he could feel the iron handrail vibrating. He looked up, to see the soles of shoes descending just as fast as his. One more level to go: Will all but jumped it.
Now he started sprinting down Smith Street, dodging people as they came out of the Salonike diner. He looked over his shoulder: a commotion behind him, caused by a man dashing through a crowd. ‘Hey, watch it asshole!’
Will body-swerved round the corner, clasping hold of a pretzel wagon to steady himself. In front of him was Fourth Avenue, with six lanes of traffic, all moving fast. At the first gap, he plunged in.
He was standing on the dotted white line separating two streams of heavy traffic. Drivers started blasting their horns; they clearly thought Will was some kind of psycho. He looked back. There, just a lane of cars away, was the stalker, the man he had nearly caught in the act of murder less than twenty-four hours ago. As if protected by the traffic, Will stared at him. What came back was a laser-beam eye that seemed to bore right through him.
He wheeled around and spotted another gap in traffic – just a beat and he would miss it. Will leapt across, turning around to see that his pursuer had made the same move. They were still just the width of a single car apart. He could see a bulge around the man’s hip, what Will assumed to be a holster.
He looked ahead: the light was still green. But for how much longer? Soon it would be red: the traffic would slow down and he would be able to cross to the other side, but so would the man with the gun. He would be within point-blank range. But there was no gap. The cars were moving too fast.
Will had only one option. Instead of crossing the road, he sprinted to his left, as if trying to catch up with the traffic. He ran faster, never taking his eye off the lights. He would act the second he saw a glimmer of red. Come on, come on. He looked around. The man was still just one lane away, but hardly moved from his previous position. Now was the moment.
As green turned to red, the traffic slowed, the cars bunching up behind each other: Will had only to dart between them, keeping himself low. Three, four, five lanes and he was nearly there.
Once across, he had to burst through a family waiting at the crossing; he knocked the balloon out of a child’s hand. Will looked back to see it soar – and to realize Laser Eyes was now just a sprint away from him.
At last, Atlantic Avenue subway station. Will hurtled down the stairs, cursing the wide woman blocking his way. Down and down, vaulting over the turnstile, hoping his ears would not fail him. Years of travelling on the Underground in London had given him a sixth sense for the mix of wind, light and humming sounds that indicated a train was coming. Will was sure he could hear it on the opposite platform. He would have to get up the stairs and across the bridge in just a few seconds. He could hear the thudding of footsteps; the stalker was just behind him.
Only moments separated them, but as Will crossed the bridge he could see the train that had just pulled in. An instant later, he was sliding down the stairs, shoving people out of the way. There was the beep-beep-beep and hiss of air that announced the train was about to move off. Just one more second . . .
Will dived from the bottom stair and across the platform in what felt like a single leap. The door had almost closed behind him when it stopped – held back by four fingers of a hand. Through the glass, Will could see his face: the eyes almost translucent, fixed in a stare that turned Will’s guts to ice. The door was inching back.
‘What you doing? You just gonna have to wait for the next train like everyone else!’ It was a woman passenger, no younger