50. Waiting
He had thought it would be the noise that stayed with him, but it was the water.
The blast was nothing, over before it arrived, a flat clap that the wind took away almost apologetically. What stayed with him was afterward. The sea going up in a dirty white flower and coming down again in pieces, with burning things riding out on the swell in every direction.
Spreading. Thinning. Even the fire had gone into the water and become part of it too.
He had not known it would be so beautiful. He'd planned it as a lock turning, one more thing done properly and in sequence, and it had turned out to be beautiful, and he took that as a sign.
One of the officers had died. He'd counted seven going out through the shallows and six coming back, which was more than he needed but less than he'd hoped.
He examined that feeling and found it stronger than he'd expected. Killing police officers had never been his goal, but this was disappointing. And that disappointment had a face.
He'd watched her race into the water like it wasn't even there. Ramming through the whole procession of them, charging her own DCI, in then out again with the big one hanging off her shoulder, and he'd found himself leaning forward like a man at a race.
He'd had to admire it. There was no other word he'd accept for what he felt. It was probably why he'd pressed the button too slow to catch her. Maybe he'd missed his chance.
Because she was finished now. He was certain of that, more certain than he'd been of anything in weeks, and the certainty was a warm stone in his chest. He knew exactly how it went from here because he had watched it go this way a hundred times before. It had happened last time, too.
There would be thin reports in national newspapers.
Words offered by quiet men in high places, speaking of regret.
The word unfortunate used several times in one statement.
Then the car back to London, and a desk somewhere, and she'd spend the next several years, if not the rest of her career, learning to hate paperwork.
They would do it to her themselves. He wouldn't have to touch her at all.
That was disappointing, but perhaps fitting. He'd spent his whole life watching institutions eat the only people in them worth anything. Now for once the machine was going to run in his favor, and all he had to do was stand still and let it.
She had been the single one of them with any wit. He'd known it the morning she came up that beach dressed wrong, and now he was sorry about it in a distant way, the way you're sorry when weather takes a good tree. He'd no longer get to take out his axe and fell it himself.
She was off the board. The rest of them were set dressing on the finale he had planned. He let out a long breath and watched the fires burning on the water.