Lyons broke ahead of the sprinting group. He chased the woman as she darted into a side alley that dead-ended fifteen feet from her turn. He had her cornered.

He crouched, looked at his quarry to catch sight of any firearm in the darkness.

She showed no weapon. She had sunk to her knees on the grimy cobbles, leaning her head against the brick wall that blocked her way. She was whimpering.

Lyons rose and turned to address Schwarz and Blancanales. "She's mine," he said softly to his partners. "Leave her to me."

He entered the dead-end alleyway and stepped remorselessly toward the petite blond woman. She let out a scream.

He took a last long, quick step up to her. "Shut your cake hole, dammit," he told her. The muzzle of his Colt touched her forehead.

She choked off her scream, stared up at him like a terrified dog, the tears in her eyes catching the starlight. But this was no mongrel. This bitch was class.

"Why did you do it?" interrogated Lyons. "Why did you get them to take so many hostages?"

"I had nothing to do with it!" she yelled back at him. Her pretty face twisted into ugliness with fear and rage. She clutched her handbag to her chest like a crucifix. "It was the Irish that did it. Irish terrorists. I'm not Irish..."

Lyons shoved his weapon into her right cheekbone and pushed her face sideways against the bricks. Nerve endings in his flexed right forearm told him the venomous kiss of the Colt was only seconds away.

"Why?" he repeated. "Tell me why." His tone condemned her as surely as the hangman's grasp on the trapdoor lever. "Tell me. Now."

The woman's cowardly collapse before him enraged Lyons.

"Listen to me, woman. This gun in my hand — I call it my roadblocker, see? Nobody goes anywhere when I've got this thing pulled. So talk. It's all you've got left," and he pushed the barrel up under her top row of teeth, forcing her mouth into a grotesque leer.

She backed away from the muzzle as far as she could, which was less than half an inch. With the gun pointing at her palate, she gasped a defiant confession.

"If I'd killed them all, I'd have had the succession. I'd have been queen for a day, pretty boy. Maybe queen for a lifetime!"

"You're crazy," Lyons pressed. "Twenty dead people and the next in line would have been suspect number one."

"But I was going to be hit, too, jerk." She laughed crazily, saliva splashing from her immobilized mouth. "McGowan would have staged an attack on me as well."

"Then that's the way it's gonna be," Lyons said without emotion. "You're going to be hit too…"

"No!" she screamed, cringing. "Don't do it! I beg of you!"

"Lady," Lyons said once again, "I don't have the time."

As his finger pressed on the trigger, Lady Carole shoved the barrel from her mouth with the handbag. Desperately, insanely, she rummaged in the bag for her handgun. Lyons eased up on the finger pressure. He let her find what she sought.

The woman pulled a small caliber piece from the bag and pointed it at her assailant.

Just as she pulled the trigger, Lyons's Colt boomed. The point-blank explosion thrust the woman's small gun under her disintegrating chin, where it discharged in turn.

Lyons's blast had taken her face away, but her own shot creased what remained of her forehead and took off her hair.

Lyons looked aghast as the dead woman's wig flew from the pulpy head to reveal a hairless skull covered in scabs and sores.

The faceless nonbeing lay crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the wall. The woman had been fearfully sick before she died. Cancerous lesions of the skull stood exposed to Lyons as he backed away from the remains.

His partners joined him. The mouth of the small alley filled with curious soldiers and police.

"Good diagnosis, good treatment, Doctor Lyons," Gadgets joked without smiling.

"And in the best tradition of British socialism," observed Blancanales, "she got it free."

18

It was not over for Carl Lyons. The shooting of the Shillelagh woman had disturbed his whole being.

Asleep at the U.S. Embassy four hours after the hit, he thrashed about wildly on the bed. Suddenly he awoke in a sweat. The action on foreign soil — maybe killing the woman — had set it off again.

He was scared. And he knew damn well what caused him such fear. A recurring nightmare haunted his sleep since his woman — hiswoman — had met her death. The dreams filled him with horror, especially since the nightmare was different each time. Each hideous experience was a variation on the death of Flor Trujillo…

This time he knew the gunman would follow Flor to the airport, that there would be yet another death. In the dream, he leaned against a row of lockers and scanned the crowd.

He saw Flor as she approached the metal detector at the entrance to the waiting area. She was beautiful. Not sick, not crazy, not violent. Just a totally beautiful woman. She joined the group of travelers already in the line. She was last. Lyons watched. From time to time she craned her neck to look through a huge plate-glass window at the planes on the tarmac.

Lyons could see the runway area through the window. The brightly painted Ecuatoriana Airlines jet looked like a Chinese paper bird in his dream. He saw the fuel attendant remove the nozzle of the hose from the plane's fueling port.

Then it was Flor's turn to go through the detector. Once Flor left the departure area, she would be safe.

The gunshot thundered in the confines of the glassed-in corridor. The slug lifted Flor onto her toes.

Even in death she was spectacular. Her exquisitely sculpted calves stood out fiercely as she rose on tiptoe. Thigh muscles strained against white cotton walking shorts. Well-shaped buttocks clenched.

Lyons watched her back arch slightly, her arms upraised as purse, passport, documents flew out of her hands.

Then she crumpled to the floor. He rushed from cover, panning his revolver across the hallway.

Nothing moved. People lay flat the entire length of the corridor. Slowly he let his arm fall as he stepped backward to where Flor lay.

She was lying on her side on the grooved rubber mat of the departure-lounge entrance.

Lyons knelt beside the inert form. He turned the body onto its back. He looked at her fine Hispanic features. He saw her full lips, cherry red with blood, touched with a hint of a smile.

Something slammed into his gut so hard that Lyons thought he was hit. Then he recognized the pain for what it was.

Lyons, awake now, moaned to think of Flor. The woman was the only person with whom he had shared his soul. Lyons hurt inside for his mother also, dead for ten years. She had known nothing of the good life, nor had she expected it. Lyons cried inside for his drunken father who achieved with his loins what he had failed to achieve in a wayward and vagrant life, and thus presented Carl to the world.

Finally, Lyons wept for himself, the lonely adolescent, the sad teenager who closely guarded his every step upward, afraid it would be taken away from him. He did everything right, followed all the rules. That was why he had become a policeman.

Lyons remembered target practice at the LAPD training academy, the first day in the shooting booth when he thought he'd blown his chance to become a cop and make something of himself.

As the dummy popped up before him, he started shooting at the head. For a fleeting instant he saw his father's face on the cardboard cutout. Lyons kept squeezing the trigger until there were no bullets left in the pistol. He continued to squeeze the trigger, again and again, until the weapons instructor tapped him on the shoulder and told him to quit it.

From that day, he understood the degree to which he must contain the rage within him.