Last Survivor

Chapter 2-2

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’

Joanne half turned and looked up into the handsome face of a policeman. She blinked.

‘Can I help?’ he said. He looked Indian, but sounded Cockney.

‘You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’

He smiled, not unsympathetically. ‘Afraid not, ma’am.’

‘Are you lost, ma’am?’ asked his rosy-cheeked female partner.

‘No.’ The word ma’am made her sound old, which, as she was pushing sixty, was not entirely unwarranted. She cursed herself again, this time for wanting to smoke; she’d given up years earlier, but moments of stress brought back the old craving.

‘You sure you’re all right, love?’ the male officer asked.

At least that made her feel younger than ma’am, she thought. Love. Hadn’t had that for a long time, either.

Joanne sighed. ‘My son-in-law was made redundant from his job, leaving my daughter and my grandchild with no viable means of support. My husband was shot dead, our farm in Zimbabwe was taken from us, and the pittance I used to receive from my child to keep me afloat has now dried up. I have no professional qualifications other than a keen amateur’s interest in plants and garden design, no savings, no pension and no prospects.’

The two officers looked at each other, and Joanne couldn’t miss their raised eyebrows.

‘I’m fine,’ she sighed. ‘Mustn’t grumble.’

They smiled and nodded and walked on, ahead of her. If any-thing the weather had turned colder and she felt her mood slump again. Joanne followed the officers to the King’s Road and started to think about where she’d have lunch. The footpath was flanked by upmarket eateries and shops selling clothes, watches, accessories and all manner of other goods as well as food Joanne couldn’t afford.

The two officers were still visible in front of her. The helmet of the man, who was much taller than his partner, bobbed commandingly, reassuringly, above the crowd.

Off to her right, in the direction of the Sloane Square tube station, she couldn’t help but notice a man with a long black beard wearing a camouflage jacket. He was coming towards them, barrelling through the crowd with enough aggression to cause a woman to abuse him. The police officers didn’t see him – the male constable was leaning over as he seemed to try and hear something his partner was saying.

As it happened, the man with the beard seemed to be heading straight for Joanne. She wondered if he had some sort of mental illness. She had been quite surprised and confronted to see the number of people living rough and begging on the streets of London since she had arrived.

The man with the beard was reaching into his jacket. Joanne realised that if he stayed on his path, at that pace, he would intercept her, if not run straight into her. The other people on the street were avoiding looking at him, watching the footpath ahead or talking to each other.

Joanne saw a glint of shiny stainless steel. The man with the beard drew a knife that was scarily long and he held it low, and with purpose. The police officers had their backs to her and were half a block ahead. The man came to her. Time slowed; a jolt of shock and fear could have frozen her on the spot, but instead it reignited a long since dormant survival instinct. If she couldn’t flee – and she could not – she needed to fight.

‘Come with me,’ he said in a low voice. He showed her the knife. ‘Say nothing, or I will kill you.’

‘Hey!’ Joanne yelled. ‘Police!’

The male officer started to look around and Joanne realised with horror that she had done the wrong thing.

‘He’s got a knife!’

Her warning call came too late. The bearded man turned his attention from her and charged at the tall policeman from behind.

‘Allah-u-Akbar!’ The man raised his hand as he yelled the words and struck downwards with the knife, aiming for the junction between the officer’s neck and shoulder, above the stab-proof vest he wore. Blood erupted and spurted over the constable next to him. She reached for her pistol but the attacker was quicker, slashing at her neck.

People screamed and ran. Joanne raced towards the bobbies and when she reached them the male officer toppled backwards onto her, pinning her to the ground. The man with the knife stepped agilely to the side.

Joanne looked up into the bearded man’s eyes but he barely spared her a glance now. A man in a suit was trying to grab his arm and the attacker swung and punched him in the face. Joanne could see now that he had a knife in each hand, and he used his left to plunge a blade into the other man’s belly.

Blood was flowing from the male officer’s neck wound over her face and her hands as Joanne tried to wipe her eyes and fought to slide out from under the man writhing on top of her. She put an arm around him and her fingers brushed the pistol in his holster. Joanne grabbed it with a slippery grip, pulled the pistol free and stared at it.

Glock 17, no safety catch – double action trigger.

Joanne rolled the police officer off her and hauled herself up onto one knee. Having dispatched the man in the suit, the bearded man was coming for her again.

Joanne raised the pistol in a two-handed grip and fired, twice in rapid succession.

She heard the bangs and the clinking of the spent rounds hitting the pavement. The world moved in slow motion. Her moments of terror at being accosted and grabbed had been stilled, subsumed, by the speed at which everything had happened, by the familiar, reassuring grip of the pistol, by the buck and the noise and the smell of the bullets leaving the barrel.

She stood, and now the bearded man lay at her feet, gasping his last gurgling breaths of life as he looked up into her eyes. People were screaming, running, but to her they moved and spoke in muffled slow motion. She had killed, again, her brain registered.

The pistol hung loose by her side now, impossibly heavy, dragging her hand down. She wanted to crumple to the ground, spent after the rush of adrenaline. Had this just happened?

The yells of the passers-by, the wail of a siren increased in volume and pitch, bringing her back into the moment as she looked around. People were coming to her. It had not been a dream; it had been real.

She looked down at the man again. He was dead. ‘Come with me,’ he had said to her.

‘Where?’ she asked the corpse out loud.

New Jersey, United States

‘Forty-five my ass.’ Rod Cavanagh slammed the remote control down so hard on the kitchen bench that his twenty-year-old son, Jake, looked up from his phone.

Rain beat against the window of his modest house. The tree outside was bare, the leaves scattered by the blustery fall winds. The bleakness of the day matched his mood this morning.

The television news anchor droned on, over pictures of a crime scene roped off with blue-and-white police tape and filled with forensic investigators in one-piece white suits. ‘Joanne Flack, Zimbabwean born, but now resident in South Africa, was visiting her daughter in London and sightseeing in the capital when she saw the alleged lone-wolf terrorist, Jamal Hussein, draw two knives and attack a pair of police officers in front of her. Flack took one of the injured officers’ pistol and fired two shots, killing Hussein. Scotland Yard said today that Hussein, born in Mali, West Africa, had travelled to England on a South African passport. The National Rifle Association has praised …’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake …’

‘Chill, Dad,’ Jake said.

‘Don’t tell me what to do. I’m the father here, I call the shots, and that woman is not forty-five years old. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fact-checking?’

‘Whoa, dude. What exactly are you talking about?’

Rod picked up a piece of toast and pointed at the television screen which showed, for perhaps the hundredth time that morning, the jerky phone camera vision of a blonde woman shooting down a terrorist. For the sake of the squeamish the video ended before the impact of the bullets could be seen. ‘Her.’

Jake looked up. ‘The woman who killed the terrorist? She looks younger, if anything. She’s badass.’

‘She’s at least the wrong side of fifty-five now,’ Rod said.

‘Wait. You know her, Dad?’ Jake actually put his phone down.

‘I’m glad to see I’ve at least got you off f*******: for two minutes.’

‘Um, hello. Tinder, Dad.’

‘TMI,’ Rod said. ‘Yes, I know her.’

‘How? Can you get me her phone number? She’s kinda hot, in a cougar way.’

‘She’s old enough to be your mom,’ Rod said.

They were both quiet for the next few seconds. Rod felt the stab wound in the heart again, as, no doubt, did Jake.

‘Sorry, buddy,’ Rod said.

Jake smiled. ‘It’s OK, Dad. So, how do you know her?’

Rod shook his head. ‘She’s Zimbabwean, lives in South Africa. I investigated her, twenty-two years ago in –’

‘The great plant sting. You may have mentioned that like, oh, maybe a thousand times.’

Rod frowned. Jake was a good kid and they were as much buddies as father and son – at least he liked to think so – and while Jake was only joshing, Rod knew he was guilty of telling the story of his biggest undercover operation too many times. After all, it wasn’t every day that you busted an international ring of endangered cycad smugglers. At the time it had been news, even made the New York Times magazine, but in this age of the war on terror no journalist or chief financial officer cared too much about Fish and Wildlife Service investigations or the international trade in endangered plants.

Rod had been lauded by the department in public as a hero, but after the prosecutions were over his career as an investigator had been quietly but irrevocably terminated. It turned out that the end did not always justify the means and Rod had been guilty of some serious errors of judgement during the operation.

‘Yeah.’ Rod stared at the television, watching the re-runs of the portrait shot of Joanne Flack and the slow-motion vision of her taking down an honest-to-goodness bad guy. ‘She’s barely changed.’

‘What was that, Dad?’ Jake asked.

Rod looked up from the flat-screen on the kitchen wall. ‘Oh, nothing, son.’

‘Dad, are you OK?’

Rod sipped his coffee. ‘Sure, why?’

‘You looked a little lost, just then. Like you were flashing back or something. Was it about Mom?’

It had been two years since they’d lost Betty to breast cancer and it still hurt. Rod felt his cheeks flush. ‘Yes, I guess, buddy. Go on, get off to work, now. Wall Street might crash without its latest young hotshot intern.’

Jake chuckled. ‘OK. And Dad?’

He looked at his son and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m proud of you, really. And the plant world sleeps safe knowing tough guys like you once put their lives on the line for them.’

Rod screwed up the napkin and threw it at his son. ‘Get out of here. Go sell off some junk bonds to little old ladies and I hope you choke on your Dom Pérignon.’

Jake got up and put his satchel around his neck. ‘Love you, Dad.’

‘Ditto.’

Rod drained the last of his coffee. When Jake had left he switched channels to watch the story on Joanne Flack all over again.

Just so he could look at her.