Tall Order

Book 15: The Spider Shepherd Thrillers

by Stephen Leather

Genres: Action & Adventure; Suspense

Synopsis

The 15th thriller in the Spider Shepherd series promises even more enthralling action from the Sunday Times bestseller Stephen Leather.

He is one of the world's most ruthless terrorists, codenamed Saladin. He plans and executes devastating attacks and then, ghostlike, he disappears. Ten years ago he blew a plane out of the sky above New York—and now he's struck again, killing dozens in a London strike. But one of the latest victims is related to the acting head of MI5, who knows exactly who she wants on the case: Spider Shepherd.

Dean Martin, a psychologically damaged former Navy SEAL, is the only person in the world who can identify Saladin. But Martin was killed ten years ago—wasn't he? Shepherd must find Martin and take him back to the killing fields on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Revenge on the world's most wanted terrorist is long overdue, and Shepherd is determined to be the one to deliver it....

Release date: July 12, 2018

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 480

Sample

The boy was only nine years old but he was a seasoned traveller and as soon as he was in his first-class seat he picked up the in-flight magazine to see what movies would be showing. ‘Seen it, seen it, seen it,’ he muttered to himself, but loud enough for his mother to hear.

‘Would you like a drink?’ asked a stewardess with dyed blond hair and a toothpaste commercial smile. ‘I have water and orange juice.’

‘Is it freshly squeezed?’ he asked.

The smile tightened a fraction. ‘I’m sure it was before it went into the carton,’ said the stewardess.

‘Do you have Coke?’

‘I have Pepsi.’

‘I don’t like Pepsi,’ said the boy. He pouted and folded his arms.

The boy’s mother smiled at the stewardess. ‘He’ll be fine with water,’ she said.

‘He’s probably had all the sugar he needs already,’ muttered the stewardess, placing a glass of water next to the boy. ‘I’ll be back with a play pack for him. Would you care for champagne?’

‘Water for me, too,’ said the boy’s mother. She opened her purse and took out a pack of aspirin, popped a tablet into her mouth and washed it down with her glass of water.

‘Do you have a headache?’ asked the boy.

‘It helps my circulation while we’re flying,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t I have one?’

‘You’re nine. You don’t need it.’

The boy put down the magazine. ‘I wish Dad was with us.’

‘He’s busy, honey. He’ll join us in Paris next week.’

‘But I want to see him in London.’

‘Your father’s a busy man, honey. He has a lot to do in Washington. You know that. Now fasten your seat belt.’

The boy smiled sarcastically and lifted his magazine to show that he already had his belt on. Then he twisted around to look at the two men in dark suits who were sitting at the back of the cabin. One of them waved. He was the nice one. His name was Tom and he said he had a son who was the same age as he was. The boy waved back.

The engines kicked into life. ‘Why do we always have to fly?’ asked the boy.

The boy’s mother frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Flying’s boring. There’s nothing to see. Why can’t we go on the train?’

‘We’re going to London, honey. We have to fly. You can’t go to London from New York on a train. But we can get a train from London to Paris.’

‘We could go on a boat to London. Boats are fun.’

The woman laughed. ‘Honey, it would take for ever. This way we’ll be in London in seven hours.’

‘But flying is boring.’

‘There are some children who never get to fly first class their whole lives.’

‘They’re welcome to my seat if they want it.’ He folded his arms and scowled. ‘I’m bored.’

‘You can watch a movie. Or play on your Nintendo DS.’

The stewardesses moved through the cabin collecting glasses and making sure that seat belts were fastened and tray tables were up. The plane reversed away from the terminal and headed down the taxiway. Ten minutes later they were airborne. The boy leaned across to the window and looked out. He saw water far below, and boats so small that they seemed like toys. He saw a ferry and three yachts sailing in a line and a huge ship that was loaded with containers. In the distance were the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The boy tried to find the one that King Kong had climbed but there were too many. Then the boy saw something small streaking through the sky. It looked like a rocket, with a plume of smoke behind it. He could see small fins on the back, where the smoke was. The boy frowned. He’d been at a space shuttle launch once with his dad but this wasn’t anything like that. The shuttle went straight up into the sky but this rocket wasn’t going straight up, it was curving through the air, heading towards the plane.

‘Mum, look at this,’ he said.

‘Look at what, honey?’ said his mother, her face buried in a magazine.

‘There, outside the plane.’

His mother sighed and put down the magazine. ‘Honey, I’m reading.’

The boy turned back to the window. The rocket was moving faster now. And it was a lot closer. He opened his mouth to tell his mother but the rocket seemed to accelerate and then it slammed into the wing and erupted in a ball of flame. The plane lurched to the left and then began to spin. The boy screamed. He turned to look at his mother and she was screaming too. Everybody was screaming. Even the two men in dark suits at the back of the cabin were screaming.

The plane was spinning faster, pushing the boy against the fuselage. He tried to reach for his mother but she was too far away. There was a ripping sound and then the back of the cabin broke off and there was a wind so strong that it tore at the boy’s hair and he saw the two men in dark suits spin out into the sky, still strapped into their seats. The stewardess with the blond hair was flattened against the ceiling, screaming in terror, then the wind whipped her away and she was gone. Those passengers who were still conscious were screaming at the tops of their voices but the sound was lost in the roar of the slipstream. Then everything went black.

From where they were standing, the three men could see the burning wreckage of the jet streaking across the darkening sky. One of the men was holding a digital video camera, and he was muttering to himself as he tracked the main fuselage as it spiralled down towards the sea.

‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,’ shouted the one named Hamid. He was from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

‘Allahu Akbar,’ echoed Saeed, the man standing to his left. He was holding the Stinger missile launcher unit on his shoulder as he stared up at the carnage in the sky. A black and white checked scarf was wrapped around the lower part of his face. Saeed was an Iraqi, though he had entered the United States with a French passport that showed his place of birth as Algeria.

The third man, Rashid, also had his face covered with a scarf, and he was wearing wraparound sunglasses. ‘This is what happens to the infidel dogs who kill our Muslim brothers around the world!’ he shouted. He had the dark skin and glossy black hair of a Pakistani but he spoke with the flat vowels of a north of England accent.

The man with the video camera turned the lens on him.

Rashid clenched his fist and punched the air. ‘We are bringing the war to your country, where it belongs!’ he shouted. ‘What we have done today we will do again and again until we bring your country to its knees. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’

Hamid finished filming. He clicked the camera shut. ‘Put the launcher in the truck,’ he said. ‘And let’s get out of here. Hakeem will be waiting and I want to see this on the Internet.’

The final pieces of the plane hit the water and the remaining flames flickered out. The three men climbed into their black SUV. Hamid got into the back with his camera. Saeed put the launcher on the back seat, slammed the door and got behind the wheel. Rashid took the passenger seat. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said. ‘We need to get away from here. They’ll set up cordons as soon as they realise what’s happened.’

Saeed started the engine and hit the accelerator. They were on a narrow track that ran by a small industrial park, a dozen or so warehouses with empty car parks. There were no street lights but Saeed kept the headlights off until they joined the main road.

There wasn’t much traffic around and he kept to just below the speed limit. ‘Did you see the way it fell apart when the missile hit?’ said Saeed. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel. ‘It must have been in a hundred pieces. More.’

‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ said Rashid. ‘And keep your speed down.’

‘You worry too much,’ said Saeed.

Hamid opened the video camera and pressed the play button. He grinned as he watched the screen. ‘I should be in Hollywood,’ he said. ‘The focus is perfect. And the way I follow the missile, Spielberg couldn’t have done better.’

‘Let me see, let me see,’ said Saeed.

‘Keep your eyes on the road!’ Rashid shouted.

Saeed twisted around in his seat. ‘Show me,’ he said.

Hamid held out the video camera.

Rashid’s eyes widened in horror as he saw the traffic lights ahead turn red. ‘Saeed!’ he screamed.

The SUV roared through the red light. A truck coming at them from the left sounded its horn and Hamid threw himself across the back seat. Its lights burst through the side windows. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ shouted Saeed, wrenching the wheel to the right and stamping on the accelerator. The truck missed them by inches, its horn still blaring.

‘Fucking hell!’ shouted Rashid. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Saeed, applying the brakes.

‘We could have fucking died!’

‘Well we didn’t, Allah be praised.’

‘Keep your eyes on the fucking road.’

‘I will, I will.’

Rashid sat back in his seat and looked at his watch. The plan was to drive to a shopping mall and transfer to another vehicle. They would torch the SUV to destroy any forensics, and then drive west. There was a good chance that all the airports would be closed in the wake of the attack but that wasn’t a problem; they weren’t going anywhere. They would hole up in a motel and wait until the hue and cry had died down.

‘Now they’re saying maybe it was struck by lightning,’ said Ricky Sanchez. He was watching CNN on his mobile phone, propped up against a ceramic mug containing a dozen or so ballpoint pens, most of which he had chewed on. The screen was showing two coastguard vessels on the ocean as a headline ran across the bottom: MORE THAN 300 FEARED DEAD AS PLANE CRASHES INTO ATLANTIC. Sanchez was in his early forties and so wide that he had trouble getting in and out of his chair. There was a small, framed photograph of his pretty wife and four young sons on the table in front of the bank of CCTV monitors covering the shopping mall above them. Sanchez was cracking peanut shells and washing the nuts down with a Dr Pepper.

‘It’s too early to tell,’ said his colleague. Dean Martin was ten years younger than Sanchez, and about half his weight. Both men were wearing dark blue uniforms, though Martin had hung his jacket over the back of his chair.

‘You think the A-Rabs did it?’ asked Sanchez, reaching into the bag of peanuts.

Martin shrugged. ‘Too early to tell,’ he repeated.

‘Fucking A-Rabs. What is it with them blowing themselves up all the time?’ He cracked a shell and popped the nuts in his mouth.

‘Could have been a missile,’ said Martin.

‘A missile? Like a rocket? Where would the A-Rabs get a rocket from?’

‘Surface-to-air missiles are easy to buy these days,’ said Martin. ‘Plenty of arms dealers out there who’ll sell anything to anybody.’

‘You’re shitting me? And they could shoot down a plane?’

‘Sure. They call them man-portable air-defense systems. MANPADS. Lots of companies make them. The missiles can be up to six feet long and engage targets up to four miles away. That means a plane above twenty thousand feet is pretty much safe, but they’re obviously vulnerable at take-off and landing.’

Sanchez looked over at him. ‘How come you know so much about shit like that?’

Martin shrugged. ‘I watch a lot of Discovery Channel.’ He stood up and picked up his jacket. ‘I’ll do a walk-around before I head off,’ he said. His shift had finished ten minutes earlier but he had wanted to watch the news reports. Two more men were due to work the graveyard shift with Sanchez but one had phoned in to say that he would be half an hour late and the other had gone straight to the men’s room with a newspaper.

‘You mean a run-around,’ said Sanchez. He weighed close to four hundred pounds, and spent most of his shift sitting in his high-backed chair watching the bank of monitors that took feeds from the fifty or so CCTV cameras around the mall. All the shops and restaurants had closed for the night but they were still supposed to do a walk-around every hour. Sanchez rarely did and wasn’t bothered whether or not his colleagues did either.

‘See you tomorrow,’ said Martin, fastening his jacket and checking his baton and handcuffs. They weren’t allowed firearms, which was fair enough because the mall was in a nice suburban area and the only problems they had to deal with were the occasional misbehaving schoolchild and the odd shoplifter.

The security office was in the basement, adjacent to the underground car park, and Martin took the stairs to the ground floor. The elevators and escalators had all been switched off and with no muzak playing, Martin’s footsteps echoed as he walked through the deserted mall. He took off his belt and placed it on a bench by the fish pool along with his holdall. He removed his jacket, then jogged up one of the escalators and did a quick run around the upper floor. It was close to half a mile all the way around and took him just under three minutes. Once he’d done his circuit he dropped and did twenty-five press-ups, fifty sit-ups, and then ran down the escalator and repeated the session on the lower level. He was breathing heavily but not sweating by the time he’d finished.

He put his jacket back on, refastened his belt and carried his holdall along to the side entrance. He had to swipe his keycard through a reader to open the door that led to the main car park at the rear of the mall. He had left his car in the employees’ car park, the furthest away from the main building.

A black SUV drove off the main road and into the parking lot. Martin frowned as he watched the vehicle drive slowly through the empty lot. His frown deepened as he realised it was heading towards another car, a white sedan parked in front of the Sears entrance. He hadn’t noticed the white sedan; it was empty and in an area not well lit, close to a bank of bushes.

The SUV switched off its headlights as it pulled up next to the white sedan. Martin started walking towards it but he kept close to the mall building. Doors opened and three men got out. Arabs, by the look of them. Two of them bearded. Wearing casual clothing. Martin stopped in the shadows, wondering what the hell was going on.

Another vehicle appeared, a large red Chevrolet Silverado truck. It growled across the parking lot, its lights off, and parked some distance away from the SUV and the sedan.

Another Arab got out of the passenger side of the truck. The driver stayed where he was. The guy who had been in the truck was overweight and in his fifties with a long, grey beard. He was wearing blue jeans and a long grey coat that flapped around his ankles as he walked towards the three men standing by the SUV. One by one he embraced them and kissed them on the cheeks. He seemed elated, and kept patting the men on the shoulders as if praising them.

Martin stopped. It was a strange place for a meeting: the mall was shut and the nearest open premises were the 24-hour McDonalds and KFC and they were a couple of hundred yards away.

One of the men went back to the SUV and took out something. He took it over to the older man and showed it to him. It was a camcorder, Martin realised. They were showing him something they had filmed. The man pumped his fist in the air and shouted something. All four men were clearly excited.

Martin walked closer, sticking to the shadows. He heard one of them shout something and the older man made a patting motion with his hand, obviously telling him to calm down.

Another went over to the SUV and pulled out a piece of equipment. The breath caught in Martin’s throat as he realised what it was: an FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher.

Martin moved closer to the wall. It was too much of a coincidence – a plane had blown up just half an hour earlier and now four Arab men were moving a missile launcher less than twenty miles from the airport.

The man with the launcher headed towards the sedan. Another man had taken a can of petrol from the rear of the SUV and was sloshing it over the roof.

Martin knew he had to act quickly. There was no point in calling 911 – the nearest police station was a ten-minute drive away and by the time a patrol car turned up the SUV would be in flames and the Arabs long gone. He started to run. The two cars were about a hundred feet away, the truck maybe a hundred and fifty.

He was up on the balls of his feet and wearing rubber-soled boots but even so the men heard him almost immediately. The one by the SUV turned, his mouth open in surprise.

Martin increased his pace, his arms pumping at his side. Sixty feet. The man dropped the petrol can and pulled open the door to the SUV. Martin knew he was going for a weapon. He ran faster. Forty feet.

The man with the launcher dropped it and reached inside his jacket. Martin ran faster. Twenty feet. The baton was banging against his hip but he ignored it. He wasn’t planning to use a baton.

The older man had the quickest reactions; as soon as he heard Martin’s rapid footsteps he had started running to the truck, which was already moving.

The man at the SUV was holding a large gun, an Uzi or an Ingram. Multiple shots exploded from both but they were notoriously difficult to aim. Spray and pray. But with a fire rate of five or six hundred rounds a minute they were very effective at short range. Martin figured that the safety was still on and he was close enough to see the uncertainty in the man’s face, so he carried on running, his boots slapping against the tarmac.

The older Arab reached the truck and ran alongside it, grasping for the door handle. He pulled it open. The driver shouted something at him and the man climbed in.

The man at the SUV fumbled with the safety catch, then swung the weapon towards Martin, but he was way too slow and Martin knocked the gun to the side with his left hand and punched the man under the chin, snapping his neck back. He heard the bang of a gun off to his left and a bullet thwacked into the side of the SUV. He grabbed the Uzi with his left hand and slammed his right hand against the stock. He turned and dropped into a crouch as his finger slid over the trigger.

The red truck was driving away, tyres screaming. The bearded Arab by the sedan had a large handgun in his right hand. He fired again but the shot also went wide. Firing one-handed was never a good idea. It was difficult to aim, difficult to track and difficult to deal with the recoil. Martin fired once and his round hit the Arab in the chest, but the man didn’t go down. The Uzi was firing 9mm rounds and they weren’t manstoppers. Martin fired again. And again. The third shot caught the man in the throat and he staggered back, fell against the car and slid to the ground.

Martin kept low and cradled the Uzi to his chest as he ran to the third man. He had turned and was rushing towards the driver’s side door. Martin reached him just as he was pulling the door open and slammed the side of the gun against the man’s head. He went down without a sound.

Martin looked around. He was breathing slowly and evenly and hadn’t even broken a sweat. The Arab he’d shot wasn’t dead but death was only a minute or so away. His eyes were wide open but flat and lifeless and blood was frothing from the wound in his throat. His chest moved slowly and as Martin watched, blood trickled from between his lips. The gun was still in the man’s right hand. A Glock. Martin went over, picked it up and tucked it into his belt as he considered his options. The obvious thing to do would be to call the police. But Martin had something else in mind – something that might work to his advantage. He walked quickly to the trunk, put the launcher in and slammed it shut, then put the Uzi on the roof, opened the rear door of the sedan and lifted the dying man in.

The Arab by the driver’s door was still unconscious. Martin rolled him over and fastened his handcuffs on his wrists before opening the door and heaving the man inside. He shut the door, picked up the Uzi and jogged over to the SUV.

The first man he’d hit was still out for the count. Martin had used his only pair of handcuffs but he took off his tie and used that to bind the unconscious Arab’s hands behind his back, then bundled him into the rear seat of the SUV. He slammed the door and looked around, reassuring himself that no one had reacted to the shots. All was silent. He peered at the road but the red truck had gone. The camcorder was lying on the ground where it had been dropped. Martin picked it up.

He pulled out his wallet and took out a business card. At the top was the logo of Homeland Security and underneath it a name and several phone numbers. He took out his phone and tapped in the cell-phone number. The man he was calling answered the phone and Martin took a deep breath. This was going to take some explaining.

Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd sipped his coffee as he stared at the bank of CCTV monitors in front of him. Outside in the stadium some forty thousand people were watching the game, but Shepherd was only concerned with the people in the stands. MI5 had received intel that half a dozen known jihadists from the north of England were going to meet at the stadium. Under normal circumstances finding them would be akin to locating the proverbial needle in a haystack, but Shepherd’s near-perfect memory gave him an edge, which is why he had been assigned to the stadium’s security centre an hour before the game was due to start. He was in radio contact with a dozen MI5 surveillance experts scattered throughout the stadium and had already spotted two of the jihadists and called in their location.

Shepherd’s near-perfect photographic memory meant that he was better at spotting faces than the most sophisticated facial recognition programs available. Shepherd didn’t just recognise faces; he remembered body shapes, clothing, even the way a person walked. It was a skill he’d been born with, a skill that had saved his life on more than one occasion. Not that his life was at risk as he sat in the high-backed orthopaedic chair and sipped his coffee. He hadn’t been in harm’s way for months. His career with MI5 had apparently been put on hold and he had been attached to the Metropolitan Police’s Super-Recogniser Unit indefinitely. There were a dozen police officers working full time in the unit, based on the third floor of a grey stone building in Lambeth, south London. There were another hundred and fifty or so officers in stations around London who had proven their ability to recognise faces and who could be drawn on when needed.

The unit had been set up in 2015 after it became clear that identifying suspects from CCTV images was a specialised skill and one that couldn’t be done by computers, and it now accounted for a quarter of all the identifications made by the police in London. Most of the unit’s work involved chasing down petty criminals – thieves, muggers, carjackers. Shepherd’s brief had been to use the unit to pursue terrorists, specifically Islamic jihadists. There were now believed to be more than a thousand ISIS fighters in the UK – many were British-born men who had returned home after fighting in Syria, but hundreds had slipped into the country under the guise of asylum seekers. Shepherd had been through American and British databases of surveillance photographs taken in Syria and spent his days reviewing CCTV footage from the four hundred thousand CCTV cameras around the city. He had personally identified a dozen ISIS fighters, three of whom had already been picked up by the authorities. When any member of the unit had any spare time they would help Shepherd, but the workload was mainly his. And that was his job. Eight hours a day. Five days a week. The visit to the stadium was the first time he’d worked away from the Lambeth office in three months.

The job was as boring as hell and he had asked several times to be moved back to operational duties but his requests were ignored. He was either being sidelined or punished, and there was nothing he could do about it. The transfer had happened after his former boss Jeremy Willoughby-Brown had been found shot dead in the garden of his home. No one had ever been arrested for the shooting and the fact that Shepherd had been in the vicinity of the man’s house at the time of the murder meant that he had to undergo hours of interviews that bordered on interrogation before his version of events was accepted. He had been en route to Willoughby-Brown’s house for a mission debrief, and he had heard two shots. By the time he reached the garden Willoughby-Brown was dead. What Shepherd could never admit to was that he had seen the killer, Matt Standing of the SAS, or that he had spoken to him after the killing. Standing wanted revenge for the death of his sister and had shot Willoughby-Brown twice in the chest. Standing had left the gun at the scene and swabs taken from Shepherd’s hands proved that he hadn’t fired the weapon, but he had been under a cloud ever since and had been kept off active operations.

He took another sip of his coffee. Two Asian men were sitting together close to the halfway line. Both were wearing United scarfs. He zoomed in on their faces. Both in their twenties, both with beards and both clearly enjoying the game. Their faces weren’t known to him. He took another sip of coffee and used his mouse to click to another camera. This one was inside the stadium, near the toilets. More Asians, but none that he recognised. There was a clock on the wall facing him, slowly ticking off the seconds. The match would be over in an hour and he’d be home forty-five minutes after that. Katra had promised him a steak with his favourite red wine sauce and he was looking forward to it.

Sarah had been a United fan since she was six years old. Her bedroom was festooned with photographs of the team, she had half a dozen scarfs and her quilt cover was in the team’s colours. She watched every one of the games on TV and whenever they played in London, no matter who their opponents were, she’d beg and plead to be allowed to go. Usually either her mother or father would give in and take her, even though they had no interest in the game. But that night her mother wasn’t feeling well and her father – an accountant – was tied up with a last-minute audit. But the tickets for the match had been purchased, so Sarah had turned on the charm with her sister and Eleanor had been easy enough to persuade. Unlike their parents, Eleanor was a big fan of the beautiful game and had agreed to take her. It was a school night but Sarah was top of her class and her parents agreed that a few hours away from her books wouldn’t do her any harm.

The score was one–all at half time and they went to the concessions area in search of refreshments. Sarah looked over at a stall selling team shirts and practically salivated. Eleanor touched her lightly on the shoulder. ‘Do you want one?’

Sarah looked up with wide eyes. ‘Do I want one? Are you serious? I’d sell my soul for one.’ She had long blond hair and was wearing a long pink quilted coat and a United bobble hat and scarf.

Eleanor laughed and opened her bag. Unlike her younger sister, Eleanor had chestnut hair, cut short, but she was also wearing a United scarf. ‘Well there’s no need for anything that drastic,’ she said. She opened her purse and handed Sarah the money. ‘You go get yourself one,’ she said. ‘Think of it as an early Christmas present.’ Sarah hugged her and took the notes and then ran to the concession stand, where there were four lines of at least a dozen people queueing to buy shirts. Eleanor couldn’t help but smile at her sister’s enthusiasm. She looked around for somewhere to buy a coffee but the area was crowded so she decided to stay where she was so that she could keep an eye on Sarah. Sarah joined one of the lines, clutching the notes.

An Asian man in a black puffa jacket walked by Eleanor. She thought he was talking into a phone but as he drew away from her she realised he was muttering to himself. She frowned. It was too easy to jump to conclusions when you saw a brown-skinned man with a beard acting suspiciously but no one wanted to be seen to be racist. But there was something about the man that seemed off and she continued to watch him. He wasn’t carrying anything but even if he’d had a rucksack or backpack she probably wouldn’t have reacted any differently. Despite the recent terrorist attacks, London was still one of the safest cities in the world and you couldn’t live your life jumping at shadows. Besides, it was a football match. Terrorists didn’t target football matches; they blew themselves up on Tube trains or brought down planes or shot tourists. The man walked away, and was soon out of sight.

A bald fan in a United shirt with tattoos all over his arms bumped into her but immediately apologised and wouldn’t leave her until she had promised that she was okay. When she looked over at Sarah again, she was only one customer away from being served. Sarah waved at Eleanor and Eleanor waved back, then Sarah blew her a kiss and Eleanor laughed. She stopped laughing when she saw the Asian man walking towards her. The man was still muttering to himself and looking around as if searching for something. For a brief moment Eleanor had eye contact with him and her breath caught in her throat. His eyes were dead. Lifeless. A feeling of dread washed over her. The man stopped walking and raised his right hand. It was clenched into a fist. He was holding something. Something metallic. Eleanor looked over at Sarah again. Time seemed to have frozen. Sarah was pointing