Free For the Good of the State by Anthony Price Page A

and then relaxed. ‘Well, he doesn’t constitute a health warning, I wouldn’t have thought—?’ Then he frowned at Tom. ‘But you’re diplomatic protection—overseas protection—? How does Nikolai Panin concern you?’
    ‘He’s here in England.’ As Tom nodded he smelt bonfire smoke again. ‘And he wants to talk to you.’
    ‘He does?’ Audley was unrelaxed now. ‘Then he’s your problem, Tom Arkenshaw—not me.’ He sniffed again, and turned suddenly towards the house, as though he had realized what his bonfire was about to do. ‘ Damn ?
    ‘No, sir—’ Something cracked sharply inside and outside and above Tom’s head, and the French window behind Audley simultaneously exploded into fragments—
    Audley started to jerk back against the splintering window as Tom’s conditioned reflexes reacted out of Beirut experience: with a car bomb when the world fragmented you were already too late—but with the bullet you heard you had one fragment of time before the next one, which you wouldn’t hear, arrived—
    He grabbed the man by whatever he could take hold of—which stretched under his hand for one agonizing delaying instant before taking the strain as he dragged Audley down with him on the stone-flagged terrace, behind the pathetically inadequate protection of the wall, before the next bullet arrived.

3
    FROM WHERE Tom finished up lying behind his own stretch of wall, he found himself looking directly at Audley across a gap through which three or four stone steps connected the terrace with the lawn. But although they were thus facing each other at about the same distance as a moment before, the unnaturalness of ground level seemed to bring them much closer together, so that he was quite irrelevantly aware first that the big man hadn’t stood very close to his razor before breakfast.
    But then the features beneath the grey stubble annexed all his attention: as he watched them they were contorted into even greater ugliness by what Tom thought for an instant might be a mixture of surprise and fear—but which he knew in the next instant was red, blazing rage, only half a second away from an irrational explosion of movement.
    ‘For Christ’s sake— keep your head down, man. ’ What lent urgency to the command was the inadequacy of the wall. ‘Unless you want your great brain spread all over the terrace?’
    Mercifully, the old ploy of the crudely descriptive warning, which he had used in far less desperate circumstances on far less imaginative men, worked well enough with Audley: the glare in his eyes flickered, but then faded as he subsided physically, shrinking down like any sensible man who had suddenly realized what the smallest piece of nickel-plated steel could do at high velocity to flesh and blood and bone. And with Audley there ought to be recollection as well as imagination: it might be half a lifetime or more since he had been under fire, but he had once been in a real war, Tom remembered.
    ‘All right, all right!’ The features twisted again, and then Audley showed his teeth like an old wolf. ‘You think he’ll try a second shot?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Tom shifted his position slightly, to get a view of the terrace and the house. The well-head offered secure protection not far away. But where could he go after that?
    ‘Aren’t you supposed to be the expert?’ Audley had his second wind now.
    ‘I don’t know where he fired from.’ Tom estimated the distance from the well to the French windows (but they might be locked) … and then to the archway leading to the kitchen passage (but that was too far for safety). ‘You were looking down the garden, weren’t you?’
    ‘I was looking at you, actually. You were telling me how you were going to protect me, as I recall—’ Audley stopped abruptly. ‘I’m sorry! I’m not in practice for this sort of game, Tom Arkenshaw—forgive me!’
    Tom concentrated on the damaged French window. There were two steps up to it, from the