“I had nothing-” Shaw stopped. What the hell is the use?
Frank was pulling him to the door. “Let’s get out of here before somebody really gets hurt.”
Shaw wiped the blood off, turned and left, shutting the door behind him.
As they walked down the stairs Frank said, “They were not told you were some kind of monster, Shaw. We just-”
Shaw suddenly stopped, sat down on the steps, and let out a sob so
loud that it seemed to clang off the walls like the boom of artillery. The remaining blood on his face was washed away by the tears that were coming in droves. For ten minutes he wept uncontrollably, his body thrashing from side to side.
Frank just stood there looking down, his hands clenched in fists, his own eyes moist.
And then Shaw stopped crying as abruptly as he’d started. He stood up, wiped his face dry.
“Shaw?” Frank said, eyeing him warily. “You okay?”
“I’m perfect,” he answered in a mechanical tone. Then he rushed down the steps, leaving Frank to gape after him.
When Shaw hit the street he started jogging. Jogging with a purpose. He was done with mourning. What was the point of trying to cope by letting the normal grieving process take place? He would never get over Anna’s death. So now he had to get back to something that really mattered: revenge. He would not lose sight of that again. And he would never stop until he’d gotten it.
And he knew just where to start.
Katie James.
This time he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
CHAPTER 62
“I CHECKED ON YOUR STORY about Krakow and about your father,” Katie said. She and Aron Lesnik were sitting in his tiny room at the hostel near the Thames in a far less fashionable part of London than The Phoenix Group digs. She’d brought him food and coffee, which he was devouring as she spoke.
“You check?” he said between mouthfuls of ham sandwich and crisps.
“Of course I checked. Journalists just assume everyone is lying to them.”
“I not lie to you!” Lesnik exclaimed and then took a gulp of coffee.
She looked at her notes. “Your father was Elisaz Lesnik, editor of a daily newspaper in Krakow. He was killed in 1989.”
“The Soviets murdered him. Poland was fighting for freedom then. We had Lech Walesa, the liberator, fighting for us. But my father he writes the truth and the Soviets they do not like that. They come one night when I am little boy and then he is dead.”
“That was never proven,” she pointed out.
“I do not need proof! I know!” Lesnik pounded his fist against the wall.
“So you have quite the grudge against the Russians?”
He gaped at her. “You do not believe me? You think I make this up because I hate Russians? I see people dead. I see blood everywhere. You ask me questions, I tell you truth.” He stared at her defiantly and took a vicious bite of his sandwich.
“So why are you afraid to go to the police?”
“I go to police and they think I have something to do with it. To them, Pole is like Russian. And then they tell people and killers come after me. I see what they do to my father. I no want to die like that.”
“You say you’re good with computers; mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Ask.”
She fired off some highly technical questions that she didn’t understand at all, but that a techno-friend had given her along with the answers. Lesnik responded to each of them correctly.