Novels by Tegger Rock

I don't remember the last ten feet.I remember the concrete, cold and gritty under my palms. I remember the iron frame of the chair scraping behind me, the awful dry rattle of it, and the hot sting of the plastic tie that still bound my right wrist to a bent length of steel. I remember voices shouting. Boots drumming. A flashlight beam swinging across the floor and across my hands and across a long dark smear of red that I kept crawling through without letting myself understand what it was.I remember his face.That was all. For the whole length of that terrible journey, there was only his face, floating at the end of a tunnel of smoke and light, pale and streaked with soot and so impossibly *there* that I thought if I looked away he might vanish."Felix," he said.His lips barely moved.I reached him.Someone cut the tie around my wrist. I felt a tug, and a snap, and a sudden strange lightness, as though a weight I'd carried for years had been taken off my arm. I didn't look to see w

It didn't hurt.That was the first strange thing. I'd always imagined that being shot would feel like something. A burn. A blow. A flash of agony that announced itself to the whole body. Instead there was only a vast, hollow, ringing quiet, and a sensation of warmth spreading down my right arm like water from a tipped glass.I looked down.My shirt was red.It had been white a moment ago. I was almost sure of it. I remembered buttoning it, in a bedroom, in a life that felt like a very long time ago, for a gala at which a thousand people had applauded a speech about trust. Now the front of it was soaked from the shoulder to the ribs, a dark, wet, spreading stain, and something warm was running over my fingers and dripping from my knuckles onto the floor.*Huh,* I thought.My knees weren't working.I noticed that with polite interest. A kind of astonished courtesy, as if the legs had been consulted and had declined to cooperate. The concrete tilted. The smoke swung up on one side like t

*Take me instead.*The words hung in the smoke.I heard them. I heard every one of them, as though they were being spoken very slowly in a vast empty church. *Take me instead, Sebastian. Leave him out of this.* The voice was so calm, so level, so terrifyingly quiet that for a second I didn't recognize it.Then I did.*No.*I'd said it with my lips. I'd said it with my eyes. I'd poured every ounce of what I had into that one silent syllable and flung it across ten feet of smoke at the man standing there in the ruined light with his hands open at his sides.*No. No. Please. Don't.*He looked at me.For a heartbeat, his eyes softened. Something moved in them, a small, helpless tenderness, a smile that wasn't a smile. It was the look of a man who has heard a plea and understood it and has no intention of obeying.*Damien.**You idiot. You beautiful, stubborn, impossible idiot.*Behind me, Sebastian was breathing.I could feel it. The hard, ragged heave of his chest against my back. The ar

Everything stopped.That was what I noticed first. Not the silence, though there was silence, vast and ringing, the kind that comes after a bell. It was something deeper. As though the building itself had drawn a breath and was holding it. The smoke hung motionless in the flashlight beams. The last pigeons had settled. Even the water, lapping at the pilings beyond the walls, seemed to wait.Ten feet.That was the distance between my pistol and the man's head.It wasn't a head. It was a head and a head. Sebastian Moreau crouched behind the steel chair like a man behind a barricade, one arm hooked around Felix's throat, one knee braced against the frame, so that a thin pale slice of his face showed over Felix's shoulder and nothing else. A cheekbone. A gray eye. A temple, dewed with sweat.And a barrel, black and enormous, pressed into the soft hollow behind Felix's ear.I had the angle.I'd have called it three inches. Four. A fraction of a second, if my hand held. I'd practiced on a r

I screamed his name into the dark.I don't know why. It was the only thing I had. The explosions had stopped ringing in my ears and left behind a high thin whine, like a wire stretched too tight, and in the black beyond that whine, the world was all flashes and shadows. Yellow light stabbing out of nowhere. The crack of gunfire, bouncing from wall to wall until I couldn't tell which direction it came from. The smell of smoke, thick and sour and chemical, clawing at the back of my throat.I'd seen him.For one second. Through a torn gap in the haze, forty feet above me, in the rafters. A shape on an iron grating, pale face turned down, a hand pressed against a rail. I couldn't have said how I knew. Some part of me had felt it before my eyes did, the way you feel a warm room before you've opened the door.*He's here.**He came.*Then the lamp had burst, and the dark had fallen, and I'd screamed."*Damien!*"Nobody answered.The ties bit into my wrists. The chair rocked. I twisted agains

I listened to Sebastian Moreau for four minutes.It was the longest four minutes of my life. I lay on my belly on the cold iron grating, with the rust biting through my coat and my cheek an inch from a bar slick with pigeon droppings, and I watched the man who'd taken Felix pace back and forth across a pool of light with a phone against his ear."No," he was saying. His voice carried up through forty feet of dark, thin and clear and perfectly at ease. "No, Pierre, let him sweat. Cross hasn't called. He'll call at the last minute. They always do."A pause."Two hours. A little less. Is the notary ready?" He listened. Smiled. "Good. Have the documents at the Aldrich by eleven. I want the transfer on the wire before noon."He ended the call.He put the phone away. Smoothed the front of his coat. Then he turned, unhurried, and walked back toward the chair.He stopped in front of Felix.I couldn't hear what he said. The words were lost in the hum of the halogen. I saw his head tilt. I saw