Chapter 43

"—toy," I finished.

But he knew that by now because the slug had hit him squarely and dropped him immediately. It was kind of like a marionette whose strings had just been cut, he simply collapsed in an untidy heap. From where I stood you couldn't even see the hole I knew it had made in him.

I turned my attention away and pointed it again at Golden. In a way it was useless; the Liberator was a single-shot weapon, you couldn't fire again unless you painstakingly reloaded and I had no more bullets with me anyway. But in another way it wasn't, I slowly realized as I saw him standing stock still; he didn't know it was single-shot, and he'd just seen it kill somebody. He raised his hands, both of them trembling.

"Don't—" he stammered pitiably.

"Shut up!" I barked as commandingly as I could. For a moment we both stood there silently and waited.

The thing had made the same loud noise it had made in the woods a few days earlier, but in here it had seemed strangely muted. The drapes, the paneling, the carpeting had all seemed to swallow the sound somewhat. I was listening carefully and I could hear nothing outside the door, nothing that would indicate the office had been alarmed.

In the meantime my mind was racing. I'd got everything I'd come for and more besides. That last little speech of Golden's was not only an open admission that the drive was his and that he knew its incriminating contents, it was his order to Quiller to kill me on the spot.

But I still had to get out of here, and meantime I'd killed a man. Never mind that it was justified, it was self-defense, the only proof of that was the recording in my pocket. If the cops came the first thing they'd do is take it away from me and I'd lose control of it. And it'd be the Capitol cops, with no training in maintaining chains of evidence, keeping things away from witnesses and so on. Would a Capitol guard—that's all they really were, guards—be ready to refuse a big Senator who demanded to see it? Especially at the request of an accused assassin who'd already shot the Senator's top assistant? So once that recording left my hands...

"Turn around," I snarled at the Senator, menacingly waggling my bulletless gun at him. The second he did, hands still raised in the air, I started toward him, reaching over his desk as I passed it to snatch up a heavy paperweight he had sitting there. I raised it as I approached him and slammed it down on the back of his head with all the force I could muster. I didn't a lot care if I killed him, too, he was the asshole who'd set this whole damn thing in motion. What I needed was time to get my ass out of the building.

Golden, too, pitched forward in the same oddly boneless way, and I threw down the paperweight and headed for the door. It took me a minute to realize that the fucking thing was locked. Quiller must have hit the latch when Golden had told him to close it. Chilled, I realized it had been their intention all along that I shouldn't leave that room alive.

It was just a deadbolt, though, and retracted without a sound. Then I opened it boldly into an empty anteroom; the secretary, thank God, was still at lunch. For the benefit of those who might hear in the outer offices I turned back into the office and called out, "Thank you again, Senator, you've really made my day!" And shut the door firmly behind me.

There actually were a couple of people working at their computer stations in the next office beyond, who glanced at me incuriously as I headed back to the front. But I passed through briskly and went on by the receptionist's desk in the waiting room, waving jauntily at the girl behind it to look as much as I could like someone who'd concluded a successful day's visit to his elected representative in Washington.

I knew I didn't have a lot of time. Within minutes, maybe sooner, a phone would ring, or somebody would need to see the busy Senator, or something. Maybe even someone would belatedly react to the Liberator's obscenely noisy report and investigate. And they'd find the Senator and his aide, and it wouldn't take brain surgery for them to make the connection to the unexpected constituent who'd come a-calling and gone away so cheerfully.

Move it! my mind kept telling me. Still, I didn't want to give the impression of a criminal running away from the scene of his crime. So I walked, but quickly, down the corridor and back through the atrium and toward the exit.

"What time is it?" I asked the guard at the entrance. I had no idea what he said, but neither did I much care. "Shit!" I exclaimed. "I'm going to miss my damn train!" And I broke into a full run as I left the building and pelted down the steps.

My little performance with the guards had given me an excuse for my headlong flight that satisfied them, and nobody much notices a guy who's running for a train station; I didn't attract undue attention. But I covered the three blocks back to Union Station in as many minutes, dodging oncoming traffic when I had to cross one intersection against the light.

As soon as I got there, though, I immediately diverted toward the queue that was formed at the entrance waiting for a line of taxicabs that had formed. I was number five, and I kept glancing anxiously back toward the building I'd just left to watch for signs of alarm. I couldn't see the entrance itself, but I figured there'd be an explosion of searching guards onto the sidewalk shortly after they discovered the carnage I'd left behind. Still nothing, though, as I waited out the delays caused by dilatory passengers taking their own sweet time about boarding their own cabs.